City mayor boasts of discovering social fraud

A former supervisor at the Taipei Department of Social Welfare’s Senior Citizen Welfare Division, surnamed Chiang (江), allegedly used her position to embezzle more than NT$12 million (US$377,596) from the savings of five elderly people under guardianship from May last year to June this year.

The most outrageous aspect of this case is not merely the suspected criminal activity itself, but that such a substantial sum could have been misappropriated over such a lengthy period, and that the discrepancy was not detected through routine audits or standard account reconciliation. It was only after Chiang transferred to New Taipei City, and her successor reviewed the accounts and transactions, that the missing funds were discovered.

A preliminary investigation claimed that Chiang took advantage of certain opportunities — such as paying placement fees for the elderly — to overstate the required amounts and withdraw more than necessary before pocketing the difference.

The funds were withdrawn through several transactions, which raises an obvious question: Did no one reconcile the individuals’ accounts during that 13-month period? If they did, how were these discrepancies overlooked? If they did not, then the underlying problem is much more severe than an individual case of embezzlement.

The social welfare department said that there are standard operating procedures for managing such funds. It should therefore answer some fundamental questions: Who was responsible for reviewing the accounts? How often were they reviewed? And why did no one notice anything was wrong?

These elderly people needed government intervention because they were unable to manage their finances on their own, yet more than NT$12 million was allegedly withdrawn from their accounts for more than one year without being detected.

What exactly was the government monitoring? After the case came to light, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said that it was the result of the department’s “proactive discovery” of the anomaly, investigation and report to prosecutors.

However, the employee who committed the crime had left, and it was only when a colleague who took over her position reviewed the accounts that the discrepancy was discovered. Can that be called “proactively discovering” the issue?

It is akin to a homeowner hiring a security firm to guard the house, only for one of its employees to steal from the house for more than a year. The theft is discovered only after the employee leaves and their replacement takes inventory to find that things are missing. The company’s chairman then comes out and says they “proactively discovered” the theft.

In that situation, what the homeowner would probably want to know is not who eventually discovered that their belongings were missing from their home, but how, after the firm had been entrusted to watch the house for more than a year, things could repeatedly disappear right under the company’s nose.

Reporting the case was the right thing to do, and whistle-blowing was also the right thing to do. But, Mayor Chiang, this still does not qualify as a “proactive discovery.”