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The Council of Ministers this week endorsed a
regulation that includes an article, which obliges
every employee of the Revenue and Customs Authority
(RCuA) to register all their properties, including
those in the names of individuals within their
immediate family. This is the first regulation of
this kind.
A year ago, the Federal Ethics and Anti-Corruption
Commission (FEACC) proposed enacting a regulation
that would enable it to register the wealth of
senior government officials, including the 547
Members of Parliament (MPs). However, the proposal,
which the FEACC claims to have been prepared based
on a study of the experiences of other countries and
certain procedures followed during implementation,
could not become law yet as there are no prior
policy frameworks that allow registering the net
worth of government officials.
Nevertheless, RCuA, which was born three months ago
from the merger of the Federal Inland Revenue
Authority, the Ethiopian Customs Authority and their
regulatory institute, the Ministry of Revenues (MoR),
has become the foremost government institute to have
a regulation that enables it to list down every
single property owned by its employees.
“Every employee of the Authority is obliged to
register all properties, including cash, of his/her
own and those registered under the name of his/her
spouse and children under the age of 18,” reads
Article 26 of the Regulation on the Administration
of Employees of the authority.
One of the institutes that formed RCuA, the former
Customs Authority, has been repeatedly exposed by
the Federal Auditor General for flaws in the
procedures allowing imported commodities to enter
the country. For example, the 2005/6 audit findings
by the financial watchdog presented to the
Parliament this year has identified a number of
flaws that range from breaching health sector
regulations to causing loss of money that should
have gone to government coffers otherwise.
Addis Abeba Lagar Customs Branch allowed 331,355 Br
worth of drugs and medical equipment to enter the
country without the permission of the Health
Ministry, according to the audit report. Some
branches failed to produce statements for more than
16 million Br worth of goods that had entered and
left the country in the stated year.
The Auditor General was not the only one to
criticize the former authority. The FEACC, in its
report presented to Parliament this year, also
joined the club of government institutes with
watchdog mandates condemning the Customs Authority.
The commission has repeatedly recommended reforms
and officials at the commission seem happy with the
recent move to register properties.
“I Am glad to hear this; it is the first step
towards stamping out corruption,” Berhanu Tesfaye,
head of Public Relations Department with the FEACC
told Fortune.
Though supported by a detailed study, the proposal
did not go any further than discussions by officials
in the circle of the anti-corruption combat. The
study includes details on ways of registering
wealth, types of wealth that should be register, and
who would perform the registration and ways of
publicizing the recorded wealth, according to
Berhanu.
But not all stakeholders are as optimistic as
Berhanu when it comes to the positive impact the new
regulation is expected to have.
“People have many ways of hiding their wealth. I
doubt that they would succeed,” an employee of RCuA,
who requested anonymity, told Fortune.
But officials of the authority believe the move is a
fundamental one towards mending the holes that breed
corruption.
“The revenue sector is always exposed to corruption.
That is why this regulation is made very strongly as
compared to regulations by other organizations,”
Abebe Kebede, temporary director of Communications
with RCuA told Fortune.
Before the merger, the three institutions had 3,000
employees that would go when the new structure is
completed, according to Abebe.
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