Department of Government Ethics

Probity is the most precious asset of Taipei City Government. To declare its determination in fighting corruption,  the City Government has annually held a series of promoting events on the United Nation’s (UN) International Anti-corruption Day since 2005. The Anti-corruption Day is observed on December 9 each year. Through co-hosting events with institutions including non-government organizations, schools, and volunteer groups, the City Government aims to raise public awareness of anti-corruption by inviting the people to participate in all sorts of activities so they get the chance to know the existence, causes, severity as well as the potential threat of corruption.
  
Hosted by the Department of Government Ethics (DOGE) of Taipei City Government, a series of events in the 2013 Together we Join-Transparent Taipei- the International Anti-corruption Day were held in collaboration with the Agency Against Corruption (AAC), Transparency International Chinese Taipei, municipal community colleges, and Taipei Broadcasting Station. Five events with different educational purposes were planned during November and December of 2013: the Integrity Role Model Selections and Awarding, the Honesty Cup College Debate Contest, Radio Broadcasting of historical stories on Integrity, Tour Seminars and Workshops on Anti-corruption Laws for Public Servants, and the 1209 International Anti-corruption Day Carnival. The events are briefed as follows:

1. The Integrity Role Model Selections and Awarding

Taipei City mayor Hau Lung-bin granted awards to praise 18 integrity role models for their honest deeds at the municipal administration conference on November 5, 2013. The award recognizes public servants who are honest and clean. At the same time, the organizers hope that the awarad will encourage others to follow the example of the winners’ good deeds, thus to form a clean and competent administrative team.

Taipei City Government holds integrity role model selection and awarding annually in order to encourage its public servants to maintain their integrity and self-control so they can perform official duties lawfully, i.e. administrate according to law. The selection encompassed a range of honest deeds of public servants such as rejecting bribes and gifts, proactively reporting malpractices or misconducts which later turned out to be corruption offences, or reporting the act of forging official documents so that the rights of citizens were protected.

Take one of the stories from the 18 awarded role models for example: Yi-Zhi Lin, who is a firefighter in Taipei City Fire Department, often assisted a physically-challenged citizen who frequently called for emergency medical assistance during 2012. The ill citizen later passed away, but his family member was grateful for the help of the firefighters and insisted on giving the branch a gift of thanks amounting to NT$100,000. As the officer on duty, Mr. Lin politely rejected the gift. He emphasized that assisting citizens was part of their duty and explained that as a public servant he should not receive any gifts from citizens. However, the citizen insisted on giving the gift. Mr. Lin later informed his supervisor of the story and assisted the citizen in donating the gift of thanks to the Fire Department, and the money was later used for the purchases of equipment for medical aids, which can benefit more people throughout the city.

Another example is the story about Zi-Han Zhang, a social worker at Taipei City Haoran Senior Citizens Home. Zi-Han Zhang uncovered that one of the residents, who conspired with his/her adopted son, deliberately hid his/her identity and used fake documents to apply for accommodation. The case was reported to the authority and later was transferred to Shilin District Prosecutors Office for further investigation; in the end, the city government successfully recovered the expenses of over NT$1 million formerly paid for supporting the resident.
 
Integrity can be achieved not only through proactive practices of immediate investigating and punishing unlawful acts to deter public servants from corruption, but also through encouraging honest deeds among public servants and holding activities such as anti-corruption seminars and workshops for the frontline personnel. These help to educate public servants to carry out their duties according to law, and to refuse inappropriate situations like lobbing, valuable gift-taking, and bribes.

2. The 7th Honesty Cup College Debate Contest

Taipei City Government co-hosted the seventh Honesty Cup College Debate Contest with the Agency Against Corruption (AAC) at the downtown campus of Soochow University for three consecutive days, which commenced on November 22, 2013. Around 120 university students from Taiwan and overseas were in for the competition. In addition to 21 debate teams from schools around Taiwan, there were also representatives from the University of Macau, the Hong Kong Baptist University, and the Universiti Sains Malaysia. All teams competed to win laurels through 32 intensive debates on the topic of “Which can better combat corruption? High salary or Severe penalty”.

DOGE pointed out that to create anti-corruption perception within university campus, there have already been debate contests held especially for college students of the nation for seven years in a row. Through the process of information gathering and group discussions, the debate topic-- “Which can better combat corruption? High salary or Severe penalty” -- aimed to attract students’ attention and engage them in public issues. For the first time, overseas teams were invited to the contest. Through the cultural exchange and interaction with students from different nations, brand new ideas about clean governance and corruption fighting were expected to emerge and develop. Director General of the AAC, Kung-Mao Chu emphasized in his opening speech that  in addition to fighting corruption through cooperation with the prosecutors, it is even more important to educate citizens and residents against corruption by reaching out to the students, government agencies, and the general public to create a perception in zero-tolerance of corruption among people. He further stressed that rooting anti-corruption awareness in schools was of the utmost importance of all these efforts, and holding debate tournaments would help lead students to think about the real cause of corruption and to express and elaborate their ideas about how to prevent it. The ideas generated from the students might provide a good source of solutions for reference in government policymaking. 
 
3. Radio Broadcasting of Historical Stories on Integrity

DOGE and Taipei Broadcasting Station worked together to create unit scripts for a special topic –“from the Ancient to the Contemporary, Voices of Integrity “. The scripts were broadcasted on the “Take a Break and Loosen Up” program at noon during weekdays of December in 2013 on FM93.1. As a feature, Mayor Hau recorded a prologue to play as the program started, inviting the listeners to observe the past and to foresee the future, to learn from the history, and to fight corruption together.

Mayor Hau emphasizes that probity is the most precious asset of Taipei City Government. In response, to encourage more citizens participating in anti-corruption events,  DOGE worked with Taipei Broadcasting Station to gather interesting historical stories from ancient China. As one of the historical stories goes , Emperor Chu Yuan-Zhang  of the Ming dynasty hated corruption so much that he treated corrupt government officials as his enemies and wanted to kill them. However, he found that killing or severe penalties alone were no true solution to ending corruption; there needed to be an appropriate control system and preventive measures formed to deter corruption. According to DOGE, it is expected that, through the broadcasting of these interesting historical stories, public awareness on the ills of corruption, as well as the importance of preventing it, will be greatly raised and enhanced.

The AAC was established in 2011, and since then, the AAC has promoted a New Concept of Integrity—based on the People’s Interest. Its mission is to ask the ethics departments to put more efforts on giving early warnings so as to stop corruption offences from happening. In response to AAC’s new concept of integrity which puts emphasis on prevention of corruption, DOGE plans to send out more anti-corruption messages and slogans through radio broadcasting, MRT advertising light boxes and all sorts of promotion platforms to make sure civil servants as well as the public understand how severely corruption could harm a society and its people, thus raising public awareness of fighting and preventing corruption to reach the goal of zero-tolerance towards corruption.