After hearing the Ministry of Justice's (MOJ) report on Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer 2013 at today's Cabinet meeting, Premier Jiang Yi-huah reiterated the government's determination to fight corruption.
"Since President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008, the administration has spared no effort to establish a clean government," noted Jiang. "Although government efforts at fighting corruption have achieved results, there is no denying that the public thinks that government agencies are not yet rid of corruption.
"The government will humbly conduct self-examination in response," said the premier. He instructed the MOJ to take responsibility for this initiative and invite other agencies to participate, with the goal of ascertaining what the government can do besides establishing anti-corruption mechanisms to improve its performance in this regard.
"Integrity is President Ma's never-changing requirement and what Taiwanese citizens expect of the government," stressed Jiang. "However, over the past few years, certain central and local government leaders and representatives were indicted for corruption, which hurt people's trust in the government and tarnished the image it had cultivated." The premier urged all government heads to pay attention to this point, act prudently and prove to their determination to crack down on corruption to the public.
"Since President Ma took office, the Anti-Corruption Act has been amended to punish those attempting to bribe a public servant to perform his or her duty as well as public servants who are unable to account for suspicious increases in their property or income," Jiang said, adding that a national clean government action plan has also been launched.
"In response to last year's corruption scandal involving high-ranking officials, the Executive Yuan and its subordinate agencies established a set of operating guidelines for registering and inspecting lobbying cases.
"These measures and the establishment of the Agency Against Corruption have slashed the number of government corruption cases and caused decreasing crime rates and rising conviction rates. The number of corruption cases per 10,000 indictments and the number of people indicted on corruption charges per 10,000 indicted defendants have both decreased. This shows that the efforts to combat corruption have paid off," the premier said.
The Global Corruption Barometer 2013 surveyed over 114,000 people in 107 countries on their experiences and opinions of corruption in their nations. The major highlights of the Taiwan survey, which can be viewed online at (http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/country/?country=taiwan), are as follows:
- 71 percent of respondents believe that corruption has decreased over the past two years.
- 66 percent believe corruption is a problem in the public sector.
- Only 16 percent believe the government's actions against corruption are effective, while 38 percent say they are neither effective nor ineffective.
Jiang questioned the accuracy of this report, noting that 36 percent of Taiwanese surveyed reportedly offered bribes to government employees in the past 12 months, which is a stunning 12 times greater than the results for surveys commissioned to experts by the MOJ, in which about 3 percent respond they have offered such bribes. The premier instructed the MOJ to follow the advice of Taipei City Deputy Mayor Tim Ting and immediately contact Transparency International to compare the details of each side's surveys to determine whether the group's survey methods or results are flawed.