The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) would initiate reform mechanisms to prevent political donation disclosure errors and promptly deal with any future incidents, TPP Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
The TPP and Ko, the party’s presidential candidate in the Jan. 13 elections, have been questioned by political pundits and local media last week about allegedly declaring false political donation income and expenses to the Control Yuan, while the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office and Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau started to investigate the issue.
There have allegedly been overlapping members in Ko’s election campaign office and marketing companies the party commissioned for promotional services.
Photo: Chen Yi-kuan, Taipei Times
SUSPICIONS
Facing several accusations and speculations, the TPP last week admitted some donation expenditure records were flawed, saying that an accountant is responsible for the flawed records.
The party said it would go through all the donation records to check for errors.
However, more questions about the party’s political donation disclosure data have been raised.
Taipei City Councilor Lin Liang-chun (林亮君) on Saturday questioned in a Facebook post why up to about 97 percent of the “donation income from individuals” to Ko’s election campaign was in “cash,” while most of his supporters are believed to be young people that are expected to be familiar with digital financial instruments.
She alleged that the party and Ko had misreported all the online donations as cash donations to the Control Yuan.
“You can tell it’s a mistake at a glance. The wrong category [cash] was checked,” Ko told reporters yesterday.
The TPP received about 180,000 donations in all, and they have reviewed about one-third of the records, he said.
MECHANISMS
The issue has dragged on for a week, and the party has reflected on the problems, learned from the bitter experience and would initiate a reform, he said.
First, the party would reinstate a “financial supervision committee,” which was not operating during the presidential election campaign, he said, adding that only one or two people were in charge of the income and expenditure accounts and many duties were outsourced, which was a big problem.
The party headquarters should establish a digital account system, which can be used with a donations account in elections, Ko said.
Digitalizing data would prevent mistakes from manually logging them in, he said.
Second, the party should have “long-term cooperation with a group of lawyers,” as political parties are often involved in legal matters, he said.
Third, the TPP should re-establish a “response task force,” which it used to have, he said, adding that how the party has handled the recent accusations is “out of tune.”
Ko said he has asked TPP Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊), who was the campaign office manager, to head a task force to deal with the aftermath of the political donation disclosure problems, and that the party is to hold a news conference every day to explain their review process.
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