Before the adoption of Anti-Corruption Act. No. 9 of 2023 (hereinafter, the Act) the asset declarations filed by certain categories of public officials in Sri Lanka were stored in hard copies in archives and were practically left unverified. Despite the possibility for any individual to ask for information from those declarations introduced in 2017, such requests were rarely satisfied, experts stress.
After the Act entered into force, a section with the declarations of senior officials was created on the website of the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (hereinafter, the Commission) with the aim to enhance transparency. Under the Act, it is the Commission that is responsible for collecting, storing and processing asset declarations of officials, as well as for publishing them.
In total, the section contains over 200 asset declarations now, including those filed by:
- the President;
- the Prime Minister;
- the Speaker of Parliament;
- the members of Parliament and of the Cabinet of Ministers;
- the Chairmen of the Supreme and Appeals Courts;
- the judges of the Supreme and Appeals Courts;
- the Prosecutor-General;
- the members of the Constitutional Council;
- the President of the Central Bank;
- the province governors;
- the ambassadors, alternate permanent representatives, other senior officials of embassies;
- the candidates in presidential elections, and other senior officials.
However, experts highlight that the declarations published on the website of the Commission still do not undergo proper verifications due to the lack of effective mechanisms for verifying their content, and are subject to significant redrafting before being published (for example, the information on the balance and date of opening of bank accounts is deleted), which hampers the possibility for monitoring officials’ assets.
In parallel in January, a year and a half after the adoption of the Law, Sri Lanka launched a project for developing an electronic declaration system which will be supported by the United Nations Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank. It is foreseen that the system will provide for an automatic selection of declarations containing indicators of commission of corruption offences such as discrepancies between the official and declared assets of over LKR 10,000,000 (roughly USD 33,700) to be verified.