TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — The Control Yuan has censured the National Police Agency and the Taipei Police Department for what it called an “endless stream” of illegal behavior by officers in recent years.
The government auditor released a report on Wednesday detailing the case of former Taipei Ningxia Road Police Station Chief Yeh Yu-hsin (葉育忻) who was sentenced to nearly 15 years in prison last year for corruption and other crimes. A court found Yeh accepted bribes worth over NT$5 million (US$152,292) from a fraud group that detained 61 people, allegedly killed three, and made around NT$397 million in illegal gains.
In addition to taking bribes, the Control Yuan report noted that Yeh colluded with the group’s leader, leaking citizens’ personal information to aid the group’s fraud schemes. It noted that when Yeh was police chief he received A grades in his performance appraisals and an “excellent” score for moral integrity, which it said was far from reality.
The report also noted that Yeh was involved in multiple disciplinary cases before becoming station chief and gained the position without proper assessment. “The Control Yuan believes that the Taipei City Police Department’s disciplinary assessment for high-ranking police officers has become a formality,” the report said.
The report highlighted National Police Agency statistics that show 52 cases of police officers improperly accessing citizens’ private information over the past three years. These actions resulted in 24 corruption prosecutions and 20 administrative violations.
“The National Police Agency has failed to supervise and implement legal education, professional supervision, and disciplinary inspections, resulting in an endless stream of serious illegal incidents in recent years,” the report read. “These include unscrupulous police officers colluding with criminal groups to access the public's personal information, deliberately leaking confidential investigations, and accepting bribes.”
The Control Yuan said that because the police agency has not established adequate systems for overseeing access to its information systems, auditors can only “look for needles in a haystack” through manual verification. It said this makes it difficult to uncover police collusion with criminal groups.
The report recommended the police agency review its systems, oversight mechanisms, and auditing procedures. It said this was needed to prevent police from leaking or selling information to criminal groups again and to regain the public’s trust.
