Anti-graft bodies 'needs to work better with other state bodies'

Indeed, lawmakers and experts are saying the NACC needs to work with other agencies to fight corruption effectively.

The National Reform Council’s anti-corruption committee held a seminar on Friday to look into the weaknesses of the key agency to try to find ways to help improve its efficiency during the reform period.

The NACC has evolved from efforts to suppress corruption among officials since the first criminal legislation issued over a hundred years ago. A committee directly responsible for fighting graft among officials was first formed in 1972 under the Sanya Thammasak administration. 

The present commission followed the 1997 constitution, acting as an independent body to suppress corruption among politicians and state officials before the latest anti-graft agency, the Public Sector Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC), was set up to help its work in 2008.

Experts as well as some commissioners have admitted that the NACC has flaws. They said the NACC has nine commissioners, one of them the chairman, to regulate its policies, with the office under its secretary-general acting as the policy implementation body. But as the office’s representative has been quoted as saying, the office has felt that it can’t function fully because each commissioner supervises its work “too closely”.

This was partly because its administrative power and authority to pass judgement on cases is unclear, they said. 

Sangsit Piriyarangsan, a member of the NRC’s committee, said the unclear boundary of the NACC’s internal authority was the result of unclear writing in the constitution of1997. And the constitution of 2007 did not help make this clearer.

The new constitution should help separate these two types of power in the NACC. Its committee members, who now number over 1,000, should have assets reported both before and after their terms to avoid criticism and to close a loophole allowing abuse of power, he said.

The government should help bolster or pass laws to support anti-corruption reform. Getting “good people” was not enough – they must be specialists. But corruption was a structural problem laws alone could not address. So, the NACC needed to collaborate with other agencies including the Auditor-General’s Office, Election Commission and Anti-Money Laundering Office to tackle corruption in an integrated way.

In the long run, public awareness and prevention were as important as suppression, he said.

Although the meeting agreed that corruption must be tackled at its roots and those involved at all levels must face the law, it proposed that the NACC work more closely with the PACC.

It would also be more effective if they divided their work to help each other cover different corruption-prone groups more effectively. 

The meeting suggested that the NACC should be responsible for a group of politicians and high-ranking officials, while the PACC should help take care of corruption cases concerning state officials at lower ranks. And there were still private sector organisations as well as people’s networks that could pose a challenge to the agencies. 

Chairat Khanittabuth, deputy secretary-general of the NACC, said the agency had enough laws to tackle graft. However, the challenge was it still lacks a proper mechanism to help it work with other agencies. 

With a new amendment in place, the NACC has more power to bring wrongdoers to justice, but it would also become more proactive to more effectively suppress corruption. Promoting public awareness and prevention should have been transferred to other agencies so that the NACC can focus more on coordination and put more of its effort into suppression.

The NACC has set up two committees to look into its existing legal mechanisms as well as its structure, which are problematic, he said.

Last but not least, the meeting agreed that it’s time the country as a whole comes up with a strategy for tackling corruption, not just leave the work to certain agencies.