The scandal surrounding the special allowance fund for government chiefs keeps growing. Following the implication of President Chen Shui-bian (
Some people have said that it is a trap inherent in the system, and that there is no need to delve too deeply into it, but that it should be solved by political means.
Basically, I do not agree with this view. I think that having the judiciary clarify the whole process surrounding the special allowance funds would amount to a thorough review of the government's organizational culture and the cause of the disease.
In theory, the funds for the national budget are made up of taxes and should thus belong to the whole body of tax payers. The representative democratic system, however, means that budget allocation rights are handed to a minority of government officials and elected representatives.
This in turn means that there is a risk that some of those representatives involved in the budget process are both wasteful and corrupt.
To prevent waste and corruption, the budgetary system is currently guided towards attempts to control and prevent corrupt practices. The organizational design includes budget, statistics and ethical units to provide control, while the legal system offers the Budget Law (
The special allowance fund for government chiefs, however, has opened up a loophole in the system. As a design to give government chiefs more freedom in spending money on public relations, these funds reflect an administrative culture centered around "sucking up" to higher officials.
A closer reading of the rules for the use of the special allowance funds for government chiefs (機關首長特別費支用規定) shows that these funds must be used for public affairs expenditure. Use of funds should be reported by "submitting the original expenditure voucher." If it isn't possible to obtain the original expenditure voucher, "at most" half of the funds may be reimbursed against claim forms.
But in practice, a big majority of all government chiefs act in contradiction to these rules. They begin by collecting the half of the funds that do not require receipts, thus in practice giving themselves a salary raise; funds intended to provide some flexibility in the use of public expenditures have been distorted into becoming a systemic possibility to enrich oneself.
This begs the question as to whether the budget and accounting staff in the concerned agency might not be doing anything. The fact is that these officials receive strict professional training and it is unthinkable that they would not know the intent of the regulations guiding the use of the special allowance funds.
Maybe they don't want to offend their agency's powerful chief or are trying to ingratiate themselves with him or her and therefore abandon the civil servant ethic dictating that they follow the law in their execution of administrative matters. This phenomenon is a reflection of the culture of flattery that is so pervasive in Taiwan's government institutions.
Furthermore, the case of the special allowance fund also reflects how Taiwan's administrative structure is ruled by Murphy's Law, which says that anything that can go wrong will eventually do so. To put it simply, this means that if members of the organizational structure are too confident and optimistic, and become ruled by routine and therefore careless, things will eventually go wrong.
If the special allowance fund scandal keeps growing, it is likely that thousands of former and incumbent government chiefs and deputies will be subjected to legal review. Their universal excuse is that they have been following the practices of their predecessors. The problem is that it is difficult to let the highest official of a government institution escape responsibility when incorrect or illegal practices are routinely perpetuated without scrutiny.
When government chiefs are following the traditional practices for handling the special allowance funds, they in fact highlight an opportunism inherent in the system: Everyone else is doing it without getting caught, so even though I know it's wrong, I'll keep doing it. I can't possibly be so unlucky as to be the one who will get caught! But the anti-corruption atmosphere that has swept across Taiwan put the spotlight on the government chief is special allowance and everyone who has ever had access to it.
Someone said that the storm over the special allowance fund is a case of people being caught in a trap set by the system. Maybe this argument would hold water if every single one of the incumbent 6,500 government chiefs were guilty of the same mistake.
However, since we know of at least two people -- president of the Taiwan High Court Chang Hsin-hsiung (張信雄) and Taipei District Prosecutors' Office chief Yen Ta-ho (顏大和) -- who have showed great discipline and followed the rules to the letter, it is obvious that it is a matter of not following the rules, not of not being able to follow them.
Rather than blame the whole mess on systemically inherent traps, we should admit that it is the result of the long existing sick institutional culture of our government institutions.
Lee Yun-chieh is a professor in the Department of Public Administration at National Open University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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