Local city and county councils remain opaque and unresponsive, with their lack of transparency leading to rampant corruption and waste, civil activists said Friday.
Citizen Congress Watch published results of a candidate pledge campaign asking Taipei and New Taipei City councilor candidates to promise to support policies to increase transparency and eliminate individuals’ “advisory funds.”
The group’s survey found that local councils are far less open than the Legislative Yuan, with the vast majority of localities not providing recordings of legislative proceedings, as well as related documentation such as attendance records.
“When we asked Taoyuan’s city council to provide attendance records, they replied that the attendance records are councilors’ information,” said Pan Chung-cheng (潘忠政), head of the Taoyuan Local Alliance, adding that while citizens can attend and view broadcasts of Legislative Yuan committee meetings, Taoyuan County council committee meetings were closed, with proceeding records were made public only after a year’s delay.
Activists said lack of transparency has made the local government budget process fester with corruption and waste. Even though local councils are supposed to be watchdogs over citizen’s funds, local councilors do not rigorously review budgets, with most local councils making little or no changes to executive branch budget requests, activists said.
Statistics compiled by the groups show that only five local councils cut more than 1 percent from executive budget requests, while eight made no changes at all.
A nationwide system of opaque personal “advisory funds” further compromises local councilors’ watchdog role, Citizen Congress Watch chief executive Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) said.
He said with the exception of Taipei, all other localities allow councilors discretionary funds for local development.
“Councils allot money to people who follow their lead,” said Hung, adding that funds are used to feed personal patronage by rewarding supporters.
“Local politics in Taiwan are politics of personal favors,” said Leung Man-to (梁文韜), professor of political philosophy at National Cheng Kung University and founder of the Legislative Reform Alliance. “Responsive democracy will only become a reality if personal-favor politics are replaced by just and impartial civil politics.”
Activists stated they used information made public by the Central Election Commission to contact all major party city councilor candidates for Taipei and New Taipei City.
Fifty-one percent of Taipei city councilors and 27 percent of New Taipei City councilors signed the pledge.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS