Editorial | The IC’s new approach

Parliament’s steep hike – by over 240 per cent – of the salary threshold at which public sector workers have to file annual income, assets and liability statements with the Integrity Commission (IC) is a logical move.

As the IC explained in September, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the commission to robustly review over 40,000 filings (44,353 were due in 2022) in a year. That number would have further exploded with the substantial pay increase public sector workers received earlier this year as part of the government’s job reclassification project.

With this development, the IC estimates that about 30,000 employees will no longer need to submit declarations. Around 10,000 will still have to.

Jamaicans expect positive returns from this development. It isn’t a free pass. In other words, people expect an aggressive IC. They will look for it to investigate and prosecute officials higher up the food chain for clear acts of corruption, rather pursuing what they now perceive to be mostly procedural matters, or small issues.

Further, if there are still low levels of criminal referrals for corruption, Jamaicans – seven in 10 of whom believe they live in a corrupt country – expect that will be because state officials aren’t wantonly leveraging their public offices for private gain – as many are now presumed to do.

In this regard, the Integrity Commission will have to review, and possibly refine, how it does its job, including being faster in completing investigations and filing reports with Parliament.

All parliamentarians (63 members of the House and 21 senators) have to file income and asset declarations. Several legislators, especially on the government side, claim that they in particular, and politicians generally, are spitefully targeted by the IC and anti-corruption advocates.

SUSTAINED ASSAULT

Earlier this year a raft of government MPs launched a sustained assault against the commission, accusing it of bias and lacking in credibility. They also promoted amendments to the law that would water down its powers and further limit transparency.

At present, the commission can’t speak about any investigation it is undertaking until after it has completed its probe and a report has been tabled in Parliament. Recently, the Speaker of the House, Juliet Holness, ruled that some IC reports – particularly if they are commissioned by the House and special reports done by the commission on its own accord – will first have to be reviewed by Parliament’s IC oversight committee before they are tabled.

“Parliamentarians are not the only category of people whose integrity in public life needs to be under scrutiny,” the legal and constitutional affairs minister, Marlene Malahoo Forte, whinged at an IC legislative review meeting in September. “We are an important part of public life, but a small part and the compliance rate is high, yet the focus is uneven. When you turn the spotlight on one category, you leave others in the dark. I want to know what is happening to those in the shadows.”

This perception by politicians that they are set upon isn’t, as this newspaper previously highlighted, borne out by the statistics.

As it noted in its 2022/2023 annual report, the IC employs “a risk-based approach and stratified random sampling” to determine whose statutory filings are subject to more robust analyses in a given period. Which is similar to the approach of most corruption oversight agencies.

DEEP ANALYSIS

Last year 563 declarations were subjected to deep analysis by the IC, meaning that 1.8 per cent of all filing for that year got this additional attention. Seventy-four per cent of them were eventually certified. A quarter (26 per cent), it is assumed, was put under further scrutiny.

While the specific outcome of each was not disclosed, the IC reported that “32 public officials and seven parliamentarians were referred for investigation”.

Using those variables, legislators accounted for one per cent of filers recommended for further investigations after the initial review. Other public officials accounted for six per cent.

Moreover, while the IC reported in its annual report that six legislators were being investigated for illicit enrichment, it also disclosed that 26 other public officials were being similarly probed.

Unfortunately, the status of those investigations is not known. Restrictions of the law prevent the IC from speaking about them.

So, the public will have to wait until those investigations are complete and the reports are tabled in Parliament. The process, for many, appears inordinately slow. And that perception of slowness to act will doubt have been reinforced by the case of former House Speaker, Marisa Dalrymple-Philibert.

Ms Dalrymple-Philibert resigned in September after the IC’s director of prosecutions agreed with the agency’s investigator that she should be charged for lying to the commission about a motor vehicle she bought and owned using government tax concessions, but placed in the control of a family member. At the same time, the IC claimed that Ms Dalrymple-Philibert, in contravention of the rules, collected travelling allowances on the car bought with the tax rebate, while she drove another vehicle. The promised charges haven’t yet been brought against her. If she was charged, it wasn’t disclosed.

Clearly, in the new environment there has to be greater urgency at the IC, whose workload is being made substantially lighter.

And notwithstanding complaints of any group, the IC has to be more targeted in its attack on corruption. It ought to have sufficient intelligence and anecdotal evidence to know where, and among whom, serious corruption is rife and where the “big fish” lurk. It must go after them.