The Performance Management and Delivery Unit (Pemandu) has admitted that it has not done enough to combat corruption, and said that it must push for more radical reforms.

azlanPemandu made the admission after acknowledging the results of the 2013 Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) survey announced by Transparency International-Malaysia's (TI-M) yesterday, which revealed a significant drop in people's perception of the government's effectiveness in combating corruption.

“The survey figures clearly show that what we have done is not enough.

“We need to intensify efforts and continue to push for improvements across the social, political and business arenas,” said Pemandu Anti-Corruption National Key Results Areas (NKRA) director Ravindran Devagunam in a press release today.

Combating corruption is one of six NKRA or areas of improvement announced by the government under its Government Transformation Programme (GTP) in 2010.

Political funding regulation by year-end

According to Pemandu, among the reforms to be pushed for involves amendments to the Societies Act by the Registrar of Societies (ROS) for political funding regulation by year end.

“Amendments will be made to the Societies Act 1966 with the aim of preventing internal leakage of funds within political parties,” Ravindran said.

This, according to Pemandu, is in line with the GCB finding that political parties and public officials are perceived to be among the most corrupt, ranked just after the police.

NONEIn a scale of one to five, with five being most corrupt, those polled gave police a score of 4.0, followed by political parties (3.8), public officials and Parliament (3.3), private sector (3.2), judiciary (3.0), media (2.7), NGOs (2.6), education system (2.4), military (2.3), medical and health officials (2.2) and religious bodies (2.0).

Other measures to “prevent opportunity for misconduct”, Ravindran (right) said, are the requirement for ministers and their special officers to declare their assets, and for the auditor-general’s performance audit report to be tabled at every Parliament sitting instead of just once a year.

The latter, he said, should be tabled at either this Parliament sitting or at the very latest, the next.

In order to fight corruption in the private sector, Pemandu is pushing for the proposed amendments to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption (MACC) Act 2009 which will allow for a company to bear corporate liability should an employee engage in graft for its benefit.

The GCB had found that only 31 percent of 1,000 respondents polled between September 2012 and March 2013 thought the government had been effective in fighting corruption, down from 49 percent in 2011.

This is the lowest since 2009, when only 28 percent thought the government effective in that area.