FACED with a growing number of public servants failing to file statutory declarations as required by law, the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption has, for the ninth consecutive year, pleaded with Parliament to allow it to deal with the matter in its own way.

“During the last nine years we have made recommendations along the line that this matter would need to be addressed by moving it from the remit of a referral to the director of public prosecutions and let it be one of an administrative sanction, which would be quicker.

“We maintain a database of all the declarants who are required to file so we can tell by referring a list to the director that those are the persons who have not filed,” David Graham, secretary manager for the Commission told the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee of Parliament (PAAC) last week.

According to Graham, the Commission has made over 10,000 referrals to the DPP for action and while the Office of the DPP has acted on a number of them, it was not enough in the context of an already overburdened court system.

“The issue that is before us is that this problem was highlighted by the Commission from its initial report in 2003, and the Commission made a recommendation then that we need to seek another way to deal with this, because that amount cannot be dealt with in the court system.

“We suggested a scale of fees and then what the Commission would do is write those agencies and garnish the wages in relation to that offence. If you fail to pay that, it would go to court. Those recommendations are encapsulated in every annual report,” Graham told the Committee.

He noted that the Commission, whose mandate is to deal with the filing of statutory declarations by public servants, has, since its inception in 2003, amassed 107,854 declarations.

“We are estimating that there is a further 60,264 that remain outstanding,” Graham said.

“We wanted also to highlight that to date, 555 declarants have been referred to the DPP and 127 taken before the court with fines of $1.4 million being levied to date.

“In relation to the investigation of declarants, we have 291 cases that we have identified. We have closed, to date, 52 of those. We have referred 10 matters to the DPP and we have rulings in respect of three. Two have been settled with the declarants pleading guilty and there is one matter before the court,” he added further.

For 2010, the Commission said 14,362 declarations have been received, significantly less than the estimated 25,000 that public servants had been expected to make.

“Our figures indicate that for the year ending December 2010 we have gotten to date 59 per cent, so approximately 41 per cent is outstanding. It is a perennial recurring decimal,” Graham told the committee.

According to Graham, it was mostly the cases of “repeat offenders” that made it to the courts in the hope that the consequences they suffered would be a deterrent to others. He further pointed out that the very secrecy provisions within the parent Act effectively kept the Commission from naming and shaming persons who have not filed.

Opposition Committee Member Fitz Jackson suggested that one way of ensuring compliance in the filing of returns was to put the onus on Government agencies and departments to ensure that their employees were duty bound to notify them that they have filed.

Committee Chair Dr Wykeham McNeill said the PAAC would take the long-standing recommendation of the commission to Parliament.

Public servants earning $2 million and above and persons holding specified positions are expected to file statutory declarations annually.