Committee slams lack of oversight on lottery funds

An organization set up to monitor expenditure of lottery funds yesterday accused local governments of misusing such funds and urged both central and local governments to establish a mechanism to monitor such expenditures.

The Lottery Proceeds Supervision Committee (彩券盈餘監督聯盟) said in a press release that "Local governments have not thought about creating better social welfare. Instead they just spend a lot of [lottery funds] on illegal subsidies to their citizens, reflecting local leaders' own political ends."

The committee did not elaborate further or identify specific governments, but it called for greater transparency about the expenditure of lottery revenues.

"We hope that both the central and local governments can set up a monitoring mechanism as soon as possible," said Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), secretary-general of the Republic of China Disabled Union, which is a committee member.

The committee was founded earlier this year to monitor the use of funds generated by the Public Welfare Lottery, which was launched last January. Other members include the Garden of Hope Foundation and the Eden Social Welfare Foundation.

The government launched the lottery to help fund its spending on social welfare. Under Article 3 of the Public Welfare Lottery Supervision Committee Regulations (公益彩券監理委員會組成辦法), 50 percent of lottery proceeds go to local governments for social welfare and charitable causes, 45 percent is given to the National Pension Program (國民年金) and 5 percent goes to the National Health Insurance Program.

The regulations, however, fail to clarify how the proceeds should be spent, aside from saying they should be used for social welfare purposes.

The regulations do not define "social welfare" or specify the amount of detail local governments must provide on their lottery expenditure accounts.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Finance, about NT$6 billion in lottery proceeds has been allocated to local governments. Kaohsiung County, Yunlin County, Taoyuan County and Kaohsiung City have spent their entire allocations without publishing details of how the money was used.

Su Li-chuan (蘇麗瓊), director of Kaohsiung City's Social Affairs Bureau, told the Taipei Times that the funds had been remitted directly to her department and used only for social welfare purposes.

Yesterday the Lottery Proceeds Supervision Committee suggested that local governments should always keep lottery proceeds separate from all other funds to make it easier to monitor their use.

The Ministry of Finance's Public Welfare Lottery Supervision Committee, however, said that it has tried its best to urge local governments to publicize the details of how they spend their lottery proceeds.

"All of the local governments are required by the committee to set up an independent fund by next year and all of their expenditures will have to be made public on the Internet. But to conform with the spirit of local autonomy, we can't go further than that," said Tsai Shu-chen (蔡淑珍), a committee official.

So far only Taipei City, Kaohsiung City and Penghu County have established independent funds for the lottery proceeds.

The Taipei City Government is the only local government managing the fund by means of a legal statute passed by its council.

"There is no supervision over the expenditure of lottery proceeds at all." said Wang. "We should push the Executive Yuan to revise the regulations to clearly regulate how local governments could spend the proceeds."