A new Cabinet is expected to begin working on New Year’s Day on Sunday, with the existing Executive Yuan and four other subordinate agencies becoming operational from that date without having their formal designations changed.
An amendment to the Organic Law of the Executive Yuan (行政院組織法) was passed on Feb. 3 providing a legal basis for the government overhaul project to begin next month. It will see the number of second-level Cabinet agencies reduced from 37 to 29 and third-level agencies from 279 to 70.
Under the new law, the Executive Yuan will be composed of 14 ministries, eight councils, three independent agencies — the Central Election Commission, the Fair Trade Commission and the National Communications Commission — two -directorates--general — the Directorate--General of Central Personnel and the -Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics — the central bank and the National Palace Museum.
Five existing central government organizations slated to become operational on Jan. 1 without any change to their designations under the new law are the Executive Yuan, the Ministry of Justice, the Council for Hakka Affairs, the Central Election Commission, the central bank and the museum.
The Executive Yuan has submitted 134 respective organic laws drafted by 28 agencies to the legislature for enactment to legitimize their operations under the new law.
As of Dec. 14, when the legislature went into recess, 33 organic laws involving 12 agencies had been enacted, while 101 organic laws governing 17 agencies had yet to be legislated.
The Executive Yuan hopes that a newly established culture ministry could become operational on May 20 if its organic law is legislated before Jan. 31, when the current legislature ends, Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) Deputy Minister Sung Yu-hsieh (宋餘俠) said.
Meanwhile, the new Financial Supervisory Commission would become operational on July 1 next year as the terms of the incumbent commission members are scheduled to end on June 30, Sung said.
Given that the scale of this overhaul is extremely large and complicated, the RDEC has issued position papers on the reorganization efforts and a task force formed last year began “rolling services” in July to facilitate whole process, Sung said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
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