Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on March 28 - April 3, 2016.

 

To date, Penang Chief Minister and DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng is the only Malaysian politician and public official at his level (chief ministers and federal ministers) to make his asset declaration public. It is available on the Penang government’s official website.

Penang executive councillors and some assemblymen have also done the same. Their declarations were audited by KPMG. In Selangor, the only other state with almost the same exercise for executive councillors, some of their declarations are also accessible.

The only other politician who has made his asset declaration public is Pandan MP and PKR secretary-general Rafizi Ramli.

These were among the findings in a paper by Shaza Onn, entitled “How can Malaysia’s Asset Declaration System be improved to help combat corruption”, published by the Institute for Democracy and Economy (Ideas) in 2015.

These findings were shared by Ideas chief operations officer Tricia Yeoh at an Asset Declaration Forum, organised and moderated by Selangor State Assembly Speaker Hannah Yeoh, in Shah Alam early this month. The other panellists were Penang executive councillor Jagdeep Singh, C4 founder Cynthia Gabrel, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) deputy director Abdul Samat Kasah and myself.

In my presentation, I listed 10 items that can be considered policy principles in making our asset declaration system work. Many parts of the presentation were based on the OECD’s (2011) Asset Declarations for Public Officials: A tool to prevent corruption, and Georgia’s Public Financial Disclosure System, which won the 2013 United Nations Public Service Award in the category “Preventing and combating corruption in public service”.

 

The 10 points are as follows:

•     Objectives: We must begin with clear objectives to increase transparency and the trust of citizens in public administration by disclosing information about assets of politicians and civil servants that shows they have nothing to hide. It must help heads of public institutions prevent conflicts of interest among their employees and resolve such situations when they arise, in order to promote integrity within the institutions. It must also monitor wealth variations of individual politicians and civil servants in order to dissuade them from misconduct and protect them from false accusations, and to help clarify the full scope of illicit enrichment or other illegal activity by providing additional evidence.

•     Legal framework: Today, our politicians are not legally required to declare their assets. Assemblymen in Penang and Selangor are doing it voluntarily. However, a code of ethics requires that ministers and deputy ministers declare their assets every two years to the MACC. The Anti-Corruption National Key Results Area (NKRA) delivery task force decided that all ministerial special officers must also declare their assets to the MACC.

For the civil service, there are related rules in the Service Circular Number 3/2000 — Ownership and Declaration of Assets by Public Officials and in the Public Officials Regulations (Conduct and Discipline) 1993. These provisions state that members of the civil service and their immediate family must declare all assets to their respective heads of departments.

What is needed is to make it mandatory for politicians to declare their assets, strengthen the system as practised in the civil service and introduce it for the judiciary.

•     Responsible institution: The prime minister, deputy prime minister and MPs must declare their assets to a parliamentary committee that is bipartisan and independent of the executive. For chief ministers, executive councillors and state assemblymen, the responsible institution should be a similar committee at the state assembly. For civil servants, it must be the MACC and for the judiciary, a special committee of the judiciary.

• Who should be obliged to declare their assets? The prime minister, deputy prime minister, ministers, deputy ministers, chief ministers, executive councillors, members of parliament, state assemblymen, mayors, counsellors, members of the judiciary, public prosecutors, and heads of departments and other high-ranking senior officials, including officers to the various ministers and deputy ministers.

•     What assets should be declared? Annual income, bank accounts, real estate, movable property (cars, jewellery, other expensive belongings), entrepreneurship activity (if any), contracts, gifts and cash.

•     How should the declaration be collected? The information must be collected within two months after appointment and annually.

•     Verification: Unless a better system is in place, an improved MACC should verify the declarations.

•     Sanctions: Anyone who fails to comply must be made punishable by law.

•     Making it public: Making the declarations publicly available is key to improving the perception of corruption. In Georgia, for example, one can visit the official website, key in the name of the relevant public official, and get information about his/her assets. We should emulate this system.

•     System evaluation: According to the OECD report, questions as to what extent public officials’ asset declarations actually contribute to lower levels of corruption or higher levels of public trust will still not be answered decisively in the near future. Nevertheless, we must consider carrying out periodic reviews of asset declaration systems and developing and employing adequate indicators to assess their effectiveness.

With the current issues and scandals surrounding a number of our politicians and civil servants, including those who have made declarations, we need to seriously strengthen our asset declaration system and make it work.


Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah is chief secretary of Pakatan Harapan and former deputy minister of higher education. He is active on twitter: @saifuddinabd.

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