Tourism Bureau Director-General Chou Yung-hui (周永暉) was yesterday grilled by DPP lawmakers who vowed to strictly scrutinize the bureau’s international marketing budget following a series of reported blunders in its materials aimed at the US market.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators Cheng Pao-ching (鄭寶清) and Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) mentioned blogger Kathy Cheng’s criticism of the bureau’s efforts and criticized the bureau for blocking her from commenting on its social media accounts.
Noting the bureau budgets about NT$1 billion (US$33.41 million) annually for overseas campaigns, Lin asked how the money is spent.
The contractor in charge of the campaign for Middle Eastern nations, who was paid NT$15 million, had created a Web site for free, but the site has only attracted about 6,000 page views, Lin said.
The bureau’s Web site aimed at Vietnamese has only 600 page views, while a site in Indonesian on Taiwan was not been authorized by the bureau and has been accused of copyright infringement, Lin said.
Chou said the bureau would review all these problems and seek to address them at meetings with officials at its overseas branches.
Cheng also took aim at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications over the bureau’s NT$40 million travel subsidy program announced on May 15 for tour groups that visit southern Taiwan and Penghu County.
Tourist visits to Chiayi County dropped by almost 40 percent last year, and yet the county was not included in the subsidy scheme.
The ministry would recommend that Executive Yuan include the county in the program, Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communications Chi Wen-chung (祁文中) said.
Under the program, members of tour groups whose itineraries include weekday visits to destinations or tourism to any of five areas — the Siraya National Scenic Area in Tainan, the Maolin National Scenic Area in Kaohsiung, the East Coast National Scenic Area or the Penghu National Scenic Area — and who spend at least one night in one of the areas, would receive NT$500 per day for accommodation.
However, the subsidies are capped at NT$30,000 per group for those visiting eastern or southern Taiwan, and NT$50,000 per group for Penghu, the bureau said.
Independent tourists traveling in a group of at least three are also eligible for an accommodation subsidy as long as they spend two consecutive nights at the same hotel: the second night’s stay would be free.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
Environmental groups yesterday filed an appeal with the Executive Yuan, seeking to revoke the environmental impact assessment (EIA) conditionally approved in February for the Hsieh-ho Power Plant’s planned fourth liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving station off the coast of Keelung. The appeal was filed jointly by the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group, the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association and the Keelung City Taiwan Head Cultural Association, which together held a news conference outside the Executive Yuan in Taipei. Explaining the reasons for the appeal, Wang Hsing-chih (王醒之) of the Protect Waimushan Seashore Action Group said that the EIA failed to address
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
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