After the Tsunami

The latest display of inefficiency and incompetence by the government was this weeks revelation that none of the NT$407 million raised by the Government Information Office for Tsunami relief charities has yet been handed over:

The Government Information Office (GIO) will dole out cash donations for tsunami relief to charity groups late this month or early next month, GIO Minister Pasuya Yao said Monday.

Yao made the remarks in response to press reports that several months after a charity campaign initiated by the GIO to collect cash donations to help sponsor children after last December’s disastrous tsunami in Southeast Asia, the money still has yet to reach the hands of charity groups, including the World Vision International, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, and the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families. These groups were commissioned by the government to handle tsunami relief. Tsai Sung-lin, a national policy adviser to President Chen Shui bian, criticized the long-stalled program, saying that it will tarnish the government’s image, the reports also said.

Back in January the GIO, in association with the charities listed above, held a successful fund-raising event; they set up a trust in a bank to handle the money, along with a committee to oversee allocation of funds. The charities went ahead and started their aid programmes, while the committee … sat on the money doing nothing. Nothing that is until the Control Yuan’s Ministry of Audit noticed, and pointed out that the GIO shouldn’t be setting up trusts outside normal governmental channels, and that the money should be transferred to the GIOs account before it could be spent.

So, the head of the GIO set up a body incorrectly (illegally?), and a committee who seem to have done nothing at all – and as a result nothing has happened seven months later. Apart from the obvious questions about general competence levels in the GIO, the role of the Control Yuan raises an interesting question …

Who controls the Control Yuan?


The Control Yuan doesn’t exist. Although it is one of the 5 branches of government defined by the constitution in Taiwan, it hasn’t existed since February – when the term of office of its previous members finished. Since then, the Legislature has refused to even review (let alone ratify) the proposed list of new members. In normal societies this would be called a 7-month long ‘Constitutional Crisis’; in Taiwan it seems it’s business as usual.

So, how does a non-existent Control Yuan work then? The [non-existent] Control Yuan has the answer:

In its press release, the Control Yuan stressed that although the new-term members of the yuan have yet to be sworn in, the yuan has been dealing with petition cases from the public in accordance with a set of provisional guidelines on how to settle the petition cases before the new members take office.

Accordingly, “we have to make such a clarification less the image of the Control Yuan should be damaged,” the press statement said.

The Control Yuan also noted that the right of the Ministry of Audit to perform the auditing job legally should be well respected.

So there you have it: who needs members defined in accordance with the constitution when you can use ‘provisional guidelines’ in their place? It must be said though that the Control Yuan (which doesn’t exist) seems to be a damn sight more competent than the GIO (which, although many people wish it didn’t exist, does)!

6 thoughts on “After the Tsunami

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  3. Wolf Reinhold

    One thing that the media has studiously ignored is the issue of interest. Roughly eight months have gone by and you can be sure that the NT$400 million hasn’t been sitting under someone’s kitchen sink.
    Another interesting piece of news from CNA:

    “The Red Cross Society of the ROC on Wednesday denied that it has been slow in distributing donations for tsunami relief, saying that the money has been earmarked for release over five years.
    C. V. Chen, president of the Red Cross Society of the ROC, said that the society has collected around NT$730 million (US$22.81 million) for relief, and that NT$150 million, 22 percent, had been spent thus far.
    Chen vehemently denied the charges, adding that the society has cooperated with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies to use the money in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Myanmar for five-year assistance projects. By then, the money used will have reached NT$680 million, or about 93 percent of the donated money.”

    Oh yeah? In five years there will be a shitload more money than the original NT$730 million; same goes for the NT$400 million. Any mention of this in the media? Where will this extra money go? Or shall I say, into whose pockets?

  4. Wolf Reinhold

    Mr. Jujuflop,
    You don’t seem to have a mailing address, so I am posting this here for you do remove and delete as it has no relation to the above.
    Anyone care to guess what animal this might be:

    TAIWAN SUCCEEDS IN CLONING ‘ECONOMIC ANIMAL’: COA
    Taipei, Aug. 26 (CNA) Taiwan has scored a major breakthrough in animal cloning by successfully cloning a special kind of “economic animal,” Council of Agriculture (COA) Chairman Lee Chin-lung claimed Friday in an interview with the Central News Agency.

    After years of assiduous efforts, Lee said, the COA has succeeded in using somatic cells to clone the animal that has both economic and medicinal value.

    Lee claimed that the COA-developed cloning technology is unique in the world. However, he would not reveal what animal has been cloned. He only said that President Chen Shui-bian will formally “decode the riddle” early next month.

    According to Lee, the COA has done all the reseach itself, but some of the team members traveled to Britain for training.

    “It took seven to eight years to come to this point at a cost of less than NT$100 million. Thanks to the correctness of our research direction, we have made tremendous headway,” Lee said proudly.

    Since Scottish scientists at the Roslin Institute created the much-celebrated “Dolly” sheep in 1996, other scientists have also succeeded in cloning rabbits, pigs, cattle and horses. But the health and life spans of the cloned animals remain highly uncertain. South Korea announced its achievements earlier this month in creating the world’s first cloned dog. U.S. scientists have succeeded in having cloned wild cats give birth naturally.

    Lee said Taiwan is second to none in the field of animal cloning. The newly cloned animals are neither dogs nor cats, he said; they are of great economic value.

    “The cloned animals have survived for a certain period of time. After several generations of reproduction, they still possess identical genetic material with the original animal,” Lee claimed.

    He further said the cloned animals are edible and safe. They are not genetically modified and have instead been reproduced from somatic cells, he added.

    The cloned animals can also be used for medical purposes by implanting lactoferrin, which can protect the human body from infections by interacting with the immune system, into the animals for mass reproduction.

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