Pulling the strings
In August, the then director of audit, Dominic Chan Yin-tat, who was due to retire shortly, expressed concern over the independence and credibility of his department following a press report suggesting that a non-professional accountant might be appointed as his successor.
He warned that it would be a retrograde step if the government named an administrative officer to head the Audit Commission.
Three months later, that is just what happened, as career civil servant Benjamin Tang Kwok-bun was appointed to the post. Mr Tang is, by all accounts, a nice person who has performed competently in his previous postings. But that is not the issue.
The problem, in the eyes of many people - including the Legislative Council's public accounts committee, is that he does not possess the professional qualifications of an accountant. In contrast, Mr Chan joined the government as an auditor in 1969 and worked in that role for the next 26 years, before becoming director in 1995.
Mr Tang, on the other hand, has worked in various government departments, in Hong Kong and overseas. This, no doubt, gives him a good understanding of how the government operates, and will help him immensely in his new job. But the fact remains that he lacks basic qualifications as an accountant.
Increasingly, the administration seems to be turning to the civil service to find people to head bodies whose job it is to monitor the government. It is treating these independent bodies more and more as government departments, and their heads as ordinary civil servants.
In the case of Mr Tang, fortunately, he will not be returning to the civil service. That is as it should be. A civil servant should only be named to head an independent body if that is his or her pre-retirement job. Unfortunately, that has not always been the case with the current administration.
For example, the new head of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, Raymond Wong Hung-chiu, is only in his 40s. Mr Wong has made it clear he will return to the civil service. That puts him in a difficult position, as he may have to investigate not only his former colleagues, but people who might be his future colleagues - or superiors - as well. This is not meant to be critical of Mr Wong, but of the post-1997 system for appointing heads of the anti-corruption body. Before 1997, a serious attempt was made to find people of integrity from outside the civil service, or to make sure the commissioner would not be returning to work in the government. This attempt has been abandoned and the ICAC, inevitably, is being made to appear less independent.
Another problem is that people who are too independent are not reappointed. The last privacy commissioner, Stephen Lau Ka-man, embarrassed the government by ruling in February 1998 that Xinhua had breached the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance by failing to allow Frontier legislator Emily Lau Wai-hing to see, within 40 days of her request, a personal file she claimed was kept on her by the agency. The Department of Justice refrained from prosecuting Xinhua, and the resulting negative publicity haunted the government for years.
The previous ombudsman, Andrew So Kwok-wing, was also not reappointed. His sin, apparently, was that he acted too independently by launching a separate inquiry into the mess at the new Chek Lap Kok airport.
