The High Court yesterday suspended appeal procedures in an anti-corruption case involving suspended Hsinchu mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) until the constitutionality of a provision permitting legislators to hire assistants using public funding is resolved.
The Taiwan People’s Party member in July last year was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison for embezzling NT$460,030 of public funds allotted for overtime pay for her assistants during her time as a legislator from 2020 to 2022.
Paragraph 1, Article 32 of the Organic Act of the Legislative Yuan (立法院組織法) permits lawmakers to hire eight to 14 assistants at public expense.
Photo: Hsieh Chun-lin, Taipei Times
However, judges ruled that the paragraph clashed with Article 18 of the Constitution, which states that people have the right to hold public office, as well as jeopardized institutional protections for public officials and undermined the stability of democratic governance.
The judges said that there have been more than 200 cases regarding improper use of publicly funded assistant and overtime fees, but Kao would be the first legislator found guilty of such charges.
The crux of the case was whether rulings for local elected representatives should also apply to legislators, according to the ruling notice.
There is also doubt about how elected representatives can observe the laws and whether judges are empowered to look into incidents not governed by the laws, as the ruling notice said.
Even the legislature — with the nation’s largest, most professional and best-funded legal research institute — cannot state the intent of the provision in question, the statement said.
“Judges, who rule by law, are certainly not equipped to go above and beyond their jobs,” the statement said.
The rules regarding assistants’ fees for publicly elected officials must be clarified, as such rules pertain to hundreds of incumbent or retired legislators and thousands of people hired using similar funding mechanisms, the statement said.
With the exception of cases in which one is lining their own pockets by using dummy accounts, most cases involving funding discrepancies are due to the muddled and opaque intentions of such laws, making it difficult to state whether such acts are criminal in nature and resulting in unnecessary legal suits, it said.
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