Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday dismissed concerns about the legality of the government’s plan to raise public employees’ salaries on July 1.
The premier made the remarks in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wong Chin-chu’s (翁金珠) allegations that the plan to ask for additional budget expenditure to cover the pay raise would violate Article 79 of the Budget Act (預算法).
According to Article 79, a government agency may request additional funds under four circumstances: When it expands its operations or business in accordance with the law, thereby resulting in an increase in expenses; when it is newly established in accordance with the law; when expenses for the businesses it handles exceed the legal budget because of a major incident; and when additional fundsis required by law or regulations.
Asked to comment, Wu said he was sticking to his plan: If President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) approves the proposed pay hike, the Cabinet will pass it when it meets on Thursday next week.
DPP Legislator Lee Chun-yi (李俊毅) questioned the lack of a stable source of funding for a pay increase, which he estimated would require an additional expenditure of NT$22 billion (US$755.4 million).
Lee said that tax revenue this year was likely to miss the government’s target for the third straight year, following cuts in the corporate and individual income tax rates.
He also criticized Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics Minister Shih Su-mei (石素梅), who cited 1973, 1981 and 1990 as examples of the government using a supplementary budget to fund pay raises for public employees.
“Those three examples happened either before martial law was lifted or before a full revamp and election of the legislature when the nation was run by an abnormal system,” Lee said.
Wu said that the proposed pay raise was legally defensible and modeled on precedents in the 1990s, when the government adopted a proposal to distribute monthly pensions to elderly farmers.
He added that the former DPP administration also increased the salaries of government employees twice.
“The tax revenue then was also NT$200 billion lower than expected and government debt increased from about NT$2.1 trillion to NT$3 trillion,” he said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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