MOE ‘long standing practice’ must be good, sacred, cannot anyhow change

When this issues was first surfaced by Gilbert Goh, MOE held on to
its “long standing practice” reasoning. To any layman, such an action by
MOE was unkind and indefensible with no sense of empathy for the poor
PSLE girl whose original result slip was withheld because her parents
owed a fee of $156.

Why didn’t Minister Ong Ye Kung immediately step in to save his ministry the embarrassment?