The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday accused Taitung County Commissioner Kuang Li-chen (鄺麗貞) of forging trip reports for her overseas travels.
Cheng Wen-tsang (鄭文燦), director of DPP’s Department of Culture and Information, told a press conference yesterday that Kuang’s husband, Wu Chun-li (吳俊立) — a former Taitung County commissioner and currently a councilor to the Taitung County Government — had gone on a trip to Thailand with county government officials in June last year. Three months later, Kuang led another group on another visit there.
Citing government officials’ public trip reports released by the Cabinet’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, Cheng said that “while the names of the delegation members, the schedules and dates differed in the two Thailand trips, the content of the two reports as well as the amount asked for reimbursement were almost identical.”
Kuang only submitted the report so she could apply for reimbursement from public coffers, Cheng said.
The Ministry of Audit’s Taitung branch said yesterday it would look into the matter and deny approval of the reimbursements if her travel report was found to have been fabricated.
Kuang has come under fire from politicians across party lines for taking 10 township heads on a 13-day trip to Europe late last month, despite forecasts that Typhoon Fung-wong was heading for Taiwan and would hit from the east coast.
Kuang has also been accused of wasting public funds on several trips abroad. The frequency of her overseas trips has also raised many eyebrows. DPP legislators said Kuang has spent more than NT$10 million (US$325,000) on overseas trips since she assumed her position a little more than two years ago.
She has also been criticized for turning the county’s promotional brochures into her own portfolio, in which she poses in different outfits.
Following growing criticism from local residents and the public, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) has asked the party’s Taitung branch to look into the matter and send its findings to the committee for further investigation.
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