Selangor state lesgislative assembly speaker Hannah Yeoh has urged the Selangor and Penang state governments to make it compulsory for all elected representatives to declare their assets.

Thus far, Selangor and Penang state exco members and Penang Pakatan Harapan assemblypersons need to declare their assets. However, this is done on a voluntary basis.

“Under the current model, it is voluntary because there is no law pushing them to declare their assets.

“Moving forward [...] the state governments of Selangor and Penang should be looking at enactments that make this declaration of assets compulsory instead of voluntary,” Yeoh said today.

Alternatively, the state assemblies of the two states could set up standing committees to look into the issue, she said.

Yeoh was speaking to reporters in Shah Alam after hosting a forum on asset declaration.

She said that while Penang and Selangor were the first to implement asset declaration at the state level, there was still room for improvement.

Therefore the forum was organised through her office to expose assemblypersons to various forms of asset declaration policies, with assemblypersons from both sides of the political divide invited to attend.

The forum featured Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (C4) director Cynthia Gabriel, Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) public education division deputy director Abdul Samat Kasah, Penang state executive councillor Jagdeep Singh Deo, Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (Ideas) chief operating officer Tricia Yeoh, and Pakatan Harapan chief secretary Saifuddin Abdullah as panelists.

To a question whether she would put forward a recommendation for the Selangor government to make asset declaration compulsory, the speaker replied in the negative, saying that the forum was not a select committee hearing.

However, the matter could still be taken up informally, she said, and she hoped Pakatan Harapan will take the lead too.

“ Something on good governance, like declaration of assets, should not be pursued state by state but it should be top-down,” she said.

The policy should apply not only to assemblypersons and exco members, but to any elected or appointed position, including local councillors and directors of government-linked companies.

Linked to CPI index

Meanwhile at the forum, Tricia Yeoh ( photo ) outlined some of the features of a good asset declaration mechanism.

Among others, this included making the asset declarations public, which she said proved a contentious issue.

In some countries, for example, only cabinet members are required to declare their assets publicly but not members of their Parliament.

Citing a 2012 survey by the World Bank, she said 137 out of 176 countries had financial disclosure systems in place.

Of these, 98 percent required cabinet members to declare their assets and 91 percent required their MPs to declare their assets as well.

However, only 43 percent of the 137 countries made these declarations public.

“ There is no point if it (asset declaration) is submitted to a certain level and the public was not aware of it but this is quite a contentious issue because some people might argue it as a data privacy issue.

“ So countries will need to decide at what level should it be publicly declared,” she said.

In Malaysia, only cabinet members, top government officials, civil servants, and special officers to ministers are required to declare their assets, she said, and none of these are made public.

Where there is public asset declaration, however, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) scores of these countries tend to be better.

Citing a 2006 study, Tricia Yeoh highlighted that countries where there were no public access and no verification of in their asset declaration systems scored an average of 2.07 points on the CPI, out of a best possible score of 10.

Where there was public access to the information but no verification process, the average CPI improved to 2.5 points.

If the information was not publicly disclosed but was audited, the average score of these countries was 3.40.

However, when the countries both audited and published the declarations, the average score of these countries was 4.13.

Tricia Yeoh stressed that all information in asset declarations should be made available to public but if it was decided that some information should be kept private, then the asset declarations could be made available by request instead of publishing it online.

However, she said doing so would require the country to have a strong Freedom of Information Act (FOI) in place.

In Malaysia, only the Penang and Selangor governments had enacted FOI laws.