The Control Yuan yesterday inaugurated a Web site on political contributions that it says will help recipients of political donations identify and reject funding that is illegal.
Hong Kwo-shing (洪國興), who is in charge of the Control Yuan’s Sunshine Act office, introduced the Web site sunshine.cy.gov.tw at a news conference, saying it has stored 830,000 pieces of information to help donation recipients steer clear of legal problems.
“The information can help recipients identify companies or individuals that are banned from making political donations,” Hong said of the Web site, which has been in the works since last December.
“Illegal donations may be returned to the donors or handed over to government coffers online within a legally stipulated period of time,” he added.
According to the Political Donation Act (政治獻金法), only political parties, political movements and candidates in elections can raise funds by collecting contributions.
The law bars many people and entities from making political donations, such as foreigners, including people living in China, Hong Kong and Macau, other candidates in the same election and people who are not eligible to vote.
State-run companies, companies in which the government controls a 20 percent stake, major government contractors and government suppliers are also not allowed to make political donations.
For many potential donation recipients, checking whether donors are legally eligible to give them money for their campaigns can be troublesome, but the Control Yuan believes the new Web site will help them identify the status of donors quickly and conveniently.
The government monitoring body said the new system will also streamline the process of reporting political contributions because it can be done online, rather than by manually submitting boxes of receipts to the Control Yuan as was been the case in the past, Hong said.
Under the existing system, donations must be reported to the Control Yuan within three months of their receipt. The Control Yuan then checks the submitted documents to verify that they are legal.
Hong said this cumbersome screening process takes an average of 143 days, but using the new Web site, the review time can be cut to three days.
Donation recipients will also be allowed to open an account on the Web site that will enable them to keep track of their accounts and print out receipts to donors, saving them the trouble of establishing their own bookkeeping system.
The Web site will soon be tested, with elections for mayors and councilor of five special municipalities set to be held on Nov. 27.
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