Taipei City's Department of Government Ethics yesterday acknowledged that several employees had defrauded the Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) out of millions of dollars, while promising to continue looking into the case.
An internal investigation at the department showed that over 10 staff members of the TRTC had successfully requested subsidies using fraudulent reasons such as working overtime or performing hazardous duties. The company had paid out over NT$10 million (US$300,000) in such subsidies each year since 2003.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei City Councilor Chuang Rei-hsiung (莊瑞雄), Liu Yao-ren (劉耀仁) and Chen Chia-ming (陳嘉銘) yesterday lashed out at the TRTC for tolerating employee corruption, urging the department to investigate the case thoroughly and prevent similar situations from arising in the future.
PHOTO: FANG PIN-CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
"Several employees have long been applying for such subsidies, and their supervisors indulged such acts. Apparently this is a case of collective corruption," Liu said yesterday at the Taipei City Council.
Chuang said more than 17,000 employees successfully applied for subsidies for performing hazardous duties each year, but many of them had not even worked on the specified days.
Some supervisors managed to receive additional payments by filing the application forms themselves, Chuang said.
"TRTC employees considered illegally appying for subsidies as one of the benefits of working for the company. It's unacceptable," he said.
Cheng De-fa (
The Government Ethics Department agreed with the councilors that illegally applying for subsidies was not restricted to a few isolalted cases and vowed to continue to investigate the case to prevent such situations from happening again.
A strong continental cold air mass and abundant moisture bringing snow to mountains 3,000m and higher over the past few days are a reminder that more than 60 years ago Taiwan had an outdoor ski resort that gradually disappeared in part due to climate change. On Oct. 24, 2021, the National Development Council posted a series of photographs on Facebook recounting the days when Taiwan had a ski resort on Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County. More than 60 years ago, when developing a branch of the Central Cross-Island Highway, the government discovered that Hehuanshan, with an elevation of more than 3,100m,
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
SECURITY: To protect the nation’s Internet cables, the navy should use buoys marking waters within 50m of them as a restricted zone, a former navy squadron commander said A Chinese cargo ship repeatedly intruded into Taiwan’s contiguous and sovereign waters for three months before allegedly damaging an undersea Internet cable off Kaohsiung, a Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) investigation revealed. Using publicly available information, the Liberty Times was able to reconstruct the Shunxing-39’s movements near Taiwan since Double Ten National Day last year. Taiwanese officials did not respond to the freighter’s intrusions until Friday last week, when the ship, registered in Cameroon and Tanzania, turned off its automatic identification system shortly before damage was inflicted to a key cable linking Taiwan to the rest of
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
RSS