If an opinion poll were to be held right now, asking people what they can recall about the government’s celebrations of the Republic of China (ROC) centenary last year, probably the vast majority of respondents would remember the annoyance they felt about the musical Dreamers (夢想家), which cost almost NT$230 million (US$7.67 million) of taxpayers’ money, but was only performed for two nights. The Dreamers fiasco drew a lot of protest from arts and entertainment circles in Taiwan, but what is the truth behind it? Does anyone emerge untainted by this tale of corruption and abuse of the law? The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office has launched an investigation into the matter, but nobody has come forward to give the public a clear account of what happened.
However, it would be a mistake to think that the widely despised Dreamers was the sole fly in the ointment in an otherwise successful ROC centenary celebration. The National Audit Office (NAO) recently released its annual report on the central government’s budget. The report publicizes the budgets for all the centenary celebrations, including that of Dreamers. In fact, it makes these figures known before government regulators, who seem to be dragging their feet, publish their findings.
To cut a long story short, the celebrations were paid for out of one overall fund, with no itemization of expenditures or information about what money went where. Onlookers could be forgiven for asking how, if the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is as irreproachably clean as it claims, could something that involved many different departments be paid for from one collective fund? The public should also be concerned about what follow-up action the Control Yuan plans to take in the light of the NAO report. Also, did the Agency Against Corruption and the Special Investigation Division have advance access to this data? Now that it has been published, are prosecutors going to launch an investigation? Or will they just drop it once the storm has blown over?
The NAO budget report reveals several examples of illegal or suspect behavior. These include circumventing the required budget review for the centenary celebrations, even though they cost a staggering NT$4.7 billion, by establishing a corporate legal entity named the ROC Centenary Foundation to coordinate the activities. The Presidential Office set aside NT$50 million to subsidize this foundation, but did not list this sum of money as a donation. The government also arranged for state-operated enterprises such as CPC Corp, Taiwan, Taiwan Power Co (Taipower) and Chunghwa Telecom to throw more money into the hat. None of these donations were required to be reviewed in the legislature. Why the cloak-and-dagger approach? It must have been because the government was worried that elected bodies would raise objections, but if they were really concerned about these objections, why did they press ahead regardless? What unspeakable reasons lie behind the government’s fear of transparency and its efforts to avoid oversight?
The NAO also has reservations about the role of the Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA). The council was responsible for overseeing the Centenary Foundation, and yet then-Council for Cultural Affairs minister Emile Sheng (盛治仁) was also executive director of the foundation. This was a clear case of conflict of interest, but why stop there? It was Ma who gave the order to hold the centenary celebrations in the first place. Task forces were set up in the Presidential Office, the Executive Yuan and the Centenary Foundation, headed by then-vice president Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), Minister without Portfolio Ovid Tzeng (曾志朗) and Sheng respectively. So this was a joint action of the entire government, and Sheng was just one link in the chain, who merely did as he was told.
It should also be noted that the celebrations were held the year before the presidential election. That led to accusations that the centenary celebrations did not distinguish between party and state, and were in fact part of the election campaign for Ma and his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強), the deputy manager of Ma’s re-election campaign, doubled as one of the foundation’s directors for a while, and was only pressured into resigning from the board after this conflict of interest was exposed. Considering how this government has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar on more than one occasion, would it be unfair to call it a thief?
The NAO has criticized Dreamers for appointing specific contractors first and only then putting its purchases out to tender. It also discovered that in many cases where the CCA provides subsidies applied for by non-governmental groups, it intentionally announces the purchases involved in batches to get around the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法) and evade its duty of oversight as the department providing subsidies. The report even found that the CCA had issued bogus invoices for events occurring outside the period of activities to make up the costs involved, and even occasions where the subsidy provided exceeded the stipulated rate. As to the Ministry of Economic Affairs, it was found to have allocated too small a budget originally, but to have absorbed the shortfall using leftover funds from other and sometimes completely unrelated budget categories.
It truly boggles the mind so see such knowing and willful manipulations of the regulations laid out in black and white in the report. What ordinary, upstanding civil servant would dare to lay their career prospects on the line by going along with such tricks, if doing so were not a matter of following policy and obeying instructions? These shenanigans have twisted the normal ethics of the nation’s civil servants into something that resembles gangsters dividing up the loot. If the Control Yuan and the judiciary go on doing nothing about it, it will be tantamount to encouraging this kind of behavior.
Compared with the NT$4.7 billion total bill for the centenary celebrations, the NT$200 million or so spent on Dreamers is just the tip of the iceberg. If everyone was seething with anger about Dreamers, how can the 23 million people in Taiwan not be incensed by the fact that NT$4.7 billion of taxpayers’ hard-earned money has been spent on who knows what, for something that most people have already forgotten, while our shameless government does not even blink an eye? Ma always claims to be clean and financially prudent. He should take a look at the NAO report and give the public a proper explanation.
Would that be too much to ask?
Translated by Paul Cooper
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