The Ministry of Justice yesterday said the indictment of a ministry employee who had destroyed official documents to meet performance standards was an isolated case and that the former employee would be punished.
Taipei district prosecutors on Monday indicted Chen Jia-guan (陳佳冠), a clerk at the Administrative Enforcement Agency, on charges including concealment and wrongful execution of official duties.
The agency said that Chen started working at the agency in 2007, but because she underperformed last year, her superiors put her on a special watch list.
Agency spokesperson Lin Chi-wen (林綺文) said the agency has regular performance evaluations that require each clerk to close a certain number of cases each month. If clerks do not perform to expectations, they must file a performance review report. Failure to improve performance leads to cuts in the employee’s annual bonus.
Chen processed debt cases valued at less than NT$200,000, but failed to meet performance targets for eight consecutive months, Lin said.
Under pressure to close the cases assigned to her, she allegedly asked a substitute service draftee in the office to destroy official documents that detailed debtors’ assets, effectively writing off debts that would otherwise have been payable to the national treasury.
Her alleged actions went unnoticed until she took maternity leave last year. While she was away, her deputy noticed many official documents were missing.
Chen received a major demerit on her employment record after making a confession to the disciplinary department.
The agency said in a statement that Chen’s case was an isolated incident and that it would step up supervision, performing random checks on cases processed by clerks to avoid such incidents in the future.
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