#3.5 Prepare legislative amendments and regulations to strengthen asset disclosures of public officials:
Asset disclosure laws are important in democracies to keep public officials from abusing their office for personal gains. Asset disclosure includes making public all properties, bank accounts, businesses and gifts owned by public officials and correlating these assets with their earnings to determine whether its rightfully procured. Asset disclosures can also point out favourable treatment by officials to companies in which they have a financial interest.
Asset disclosure for public officials is laid out in the Public Leadership Code of Ethics Act 1995 amended in 2001, which set up an Ethics commission headed by an Ethics commissioner. All asset disclosures are submitted to the Ethics Commissioner who is charged with the task of auditing the disclosures. There have been serious issues raised about this process as NO asset disclosures have been challenged by the commissioner so far. Furthermore, there have been widespread reports that many public officials do not file their disclosure forms as required by law. Also, asset disclosure forms are not disclosed to the public and anyone wishing to access these has to apply to the commissioner and cannot disclose any wrongdoing to the public. This is a serious breach of the public interest defence and the asset disclosure laws have to be strengthened to: 1. Make all disclosures public without any exceptions 2. Allow journalists and the public in general to disclose information found in the asset disclosure forms in mass media. 3. Release a list of public officials especially high ranking ones who haven't submitted their forms by the required deadline.
Although amendments to these laws have been discussed for many years now, no conclusive change has been submitted to the parliament so far and thus we rate this PROMISE BROKEN until a conclusive amendment is submitted in parliament that addresses the concerns raised.
No comments:
Post a Comment