Is whistleblower protection necessary in Singapore?

Is whistleblower protection necessary in Singapore?

Reverend Ming Yi, the founder and former CEO of the Ren Ci Charity, is currently on trial for serious abuses of authority and mismanagement of funds. This is the latest scandal to hit the local charity sector, after the Youth Challenge scandal in 2007, and the NKF scandal in 2005. In all three instances, a capable, charismatic leader became so powerful that they became a law unto themselves, with each individual charity’s Board of Directors simply rubberstamping their decisions instead of keeping a watchful vigilance on their activities.

During Rev. Ming Yi’s trial, a key witness, Mrs. Chan Ching Oi, a member of the Ren Ci Charity Hospital management committee, said that the committee members weren’t aware of how much Rev. Ming was paid. Instead, he was allowed to set his own salary and run the foundation any way he felt like. In short, the hospital management committee and the Ren Ci Charity foundation’s Board of Directors were guilty of gross dereliction of duty. When asked why, Mrs. Chan replied that Rev. Ming was a highly respected Buddhist monk, so there was no reason not to trust him; especially since he had worked very hard to make the charity what it is today, the second largest charity foundation in the country after the National Kidney Foundation. What is strange about this of course is that Buddhist monks have taken a vow of poverty, so why Rev. Ming Yi was paid a salary instead of having it all donated to charity is a question that the Board has to answer for.

This is not the first instance of a charity CEO being allowed to do as he pleased with the tacit compliance of the Board of Directors. T. T. Durai also ran the NKF on the basis of trust from its board. And look where it got them. Vincent Lam ran Youth Challenge on the basis of trust from its board as well. And look where it got them too. So did other charities such as SATA. And look at what happened each and every single time. Isn’t this ample proof that a leader who was once capable and responsible may eventually become corrupted and lose sight of his original mission when given unlimited power without any mechanisms of checks-and-balances?

Following the NKF scandal, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, the Minister of Community, Youth and Sports said that the lack of transparency in the foundation was unacceptable, and said that it should never happen again. This, of course, came after Durai dropped his defamation suit against Singapore Press Holdings. It should be noted that before the facts surrounding Durai’s abuses became public knowledge, both the NKF’s former patron, Mrs. Goh Chok Tong, and the Minister for Health, Mr. Khaw Boon Wan, had openly showed support for him. Mrs. Goh even said that Durai’s $600,000/- annual salary was “peanuts” for a capable CEO who had done as much for the foundation as he had. Yet despite Dr. Balakrishnan’s statement that such similar incidents “should never happen again”, such incidents did happen again. And again. And again.

Haven’t the authorities learnt anything by now? Don’t these repeated failures of governances prove that the existing system in Singapore has failed to prevent such abuses? Don’t they prove that a fresh approach towards enforcement of governance is required, and that not only is a system of checks and balances necessary to prevent abuses of authority by CEOs, but that whistleblower protection is absolutely vital to ensure that executives aren’t able to misuse their authority with impunity? The government’s reassurances that they have only appointed the best holds no water: T. T. Durai, Rev. Ming Yi, Vincent Lam and others were all proven capable leaders; the real problem wasn’t that they were incompetent, the real problem was that they became intoxicated with power and lost sight of their original objectives. Had whistleblower protection been part of Singapore law, it is highly unlikely that these problems would have gone on for as long as they have or grew as large as they did; the whistleblowers would have surfaced these problems into the public’s attention, and the problems themselves nipped in the bud.

Before the NKF scandal became public knowledge, then-Prime Minister Mr. Goh Chok Tong said that the failures of governances in the Enron saga and World.Com proved that the American system had its weaknesses, and that Singapore’s “Asian-values” based system was better suited for us. Yet was the American system truly a failure, at least in the Enron case? A closer examination of the facts would seem to indicate otherwise. It is true that the auditors in the Enron and World.com scandals failed to uncover serious abuses by the CEOs of these countries, but that was only the first level of safeguarding. The second level, whistleblower protection, worked very well in the Enron scandal, as it enabled Enron CEO Kenneth Lay’s Executive Secretary Ms. Sharron Watkins to expose his crimes publicly, putting an end to his abuses. And certainly the NKF, Youth Challenge and Ren Ci scandals all proved the failures of their respective auditors to detect managerial abuses. The possibility that a whistleblower protection program could have resulted in the emergences of local answers to Ms. Watkins, who courageously jeopardized her own career to expose Mr. Lay’s abuses, and that the actions of such individuals could have prevented these scandals from escalating out of control the way they did, cannot be ruled out. So how then is Singapore’s “Asian-values” based governance enforcement system superior, when not only did local auditors fail to uncover abuses, just as in the Enron case, but its lack of whistleblower protection in turn meant that staffs who are aware of such abuses cannot safely report them without fear of reprisals?

So what is the excuse that the government gives for not protecting whistleblowers then? That it is to prevent employees with an ax to grind from sabotaging their superiors? And how often do good, capable superiors get sabotaged by disgruntled staffs? After all, good capable leaders are usually highly-respected, if not well-liked by their staffs. On the contrary, the leaders that tend to be loathed by their staffs tend to be incompetent, even corrupted. Isn’t exposing high level corruption far more important than the risk of an occasional low-ranking troublemaker trying to sabotage a fair, capable leader? If Boards of Directors prefer to trust their management instead of monitoring their performances, let alone protecting whistleblowers who risk their careers to expose corruption and abuse by these managers, then would they not have failed in their duty to ensure their managements’ accountabilities for their actions? Or are they afraid that whistleblowers may reveal facts that could be very embarrassing for them, even if nothing illegal was done?

This is a question that appears to answer itself: it was a whistleblower that revealed that two employees of the North-West CDC had received 8 months bonus payments. Since then, Dr. Teo Ho Pin, mayor of the North-West precinct, Mr. Khaw Boon Wan, MP for Woodlands GRC, and Mr. Lim Boon Heng, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, have all repeatedly stumbled over themselves trying to justify the payments. Or to avoid having to answer for the payments, as the case may be. Whatever the case may be, having such extravagances made public during a recession proved to be most embarrassing for the authorities, who seem unable to account for their “ignorance” of the matter, and to even appear foolish in public by their repeated claims of “I don’t know.” It is very likely that they privately wish that the whistleblower would simply crawl under a rock and die instead of publicly exposing this matter instead.

On the question of accountability, who do the CEOs of GIC or Temasek Holdings answer to? The people? Parliament? The President? The Finance Minister? Having lost millions in failed investments, who are they supposed to explain these debacles to? And more importantly, why are no answers forthcoming? If Singapore society functions on the basis of “trust”, then clearly the CEOs of GIC and Temasek Holdings have failed in delivering on the “trust” invested in them, as can be seen by their failures to invest the country’s monies wisely, to take responsibility for their failings, and to answer for their mistakes. Of course, there is no known indication or even suggestion of illegal actions on the part of anyone in the loss of monies in these organizations; nonetheless, even if everything done was entirely above-board, whistleblower protection may still have caused the bad investments made to surface earlier, allowing for swift action to stem losses. Had such whistleblower protection systems been in place, the amounts lost may have been far less, possibly even negligible.

The abuses by Durai, Ming Yi and Vincent Lam could very easily have been nipped in the bud by whistleblower protection. According to Mr. Khaw Boon Wan, several independent investigations had been conducted by MoH into allegations against the NKF, and nothing untoward was ever found. Yet it was obvious that things were very wrong there, as was eventually revealed. Were there no witnesses that the investigators could have spoken to? It would certainly seem that way, based upon Mr. Khaw’s claims, and yet several whistleblowers who tried to report Durai’s excesses were sued by him, some into bankruptcy, because their identities were known to him. How this could possibly happen remains unknown, unless of course their identities were revealed to him for him to conduct internal investigations into his own misdeeds. If this was indeed the case, then why Durai and the NKF board were entrusted to investigate allegations of their own misdeeds instead of an impartial, external third-party investigation conducted should be publicly queried. Regardless of the reasons for this, the lack of whistleblower protection meant that they knew who were reporting their abuses, and they made sure that these well-intentioned people pay for their courageous acts dearly. Anyone who has done nothing wrong has nothing to fear from whistleblowing. This commonsense adage should make everyone wonder why the authorities are so afraid of whistleblowers that they refuse to protect them.

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