Public Funding | Sonia Chan admits discrepancy between laws and reality

The laws that regulate the use of public funds granted to associations are currently obsolete and ineffective, the coordinator of the Office for the Planning and Supervision of Public Assets, Sonia Chan, acknowledged in a reply to lawmaker Sulu Sou’s written inquiry.
In the reply, Chan said that the two operative laws “no longer correspond to the current social situation and increasingly do not fulfill the demands of society regarding the supervision, rationality and transparency in the use of public funds.” She added, “Therefore, it is necessary to globally review, update and improve the regime.”
Chan further explained that such regulations have been in force for over 20 years and were created for Macau’s social situation at that time.
“At that time, the autonomous funds with [the capacity] to provide financial support to associations were mainly the Macau Cooperation and Development Foundation and the Macao Foundation,” she noted, explaining that the law was initially written at a time when the number of registered local associations was around 1,700.
Nowadays, the number of autonomous funds has grown to over 20 and the number of associations has risen to around 10,000. According to Chan, there is now an urgent need to amend this legal regime.
Chan, a former Secretary for Administration and Justice in the previous government headed by Chui Sai On, also added that such an amendment has been planned and is part of the Policy Address from the government. Chan stated that her office “already initiated the preliminary work for the legal production to establish a basic and unified regime for the evaluation and granting of financial support.”
Sou has addressed the topic of supervision and control over the government’s financial support to associations for several years, dubbing the existing use of public funds non-transparent, ineffective and wasteful on multiple occasions.
For Sou, the need to change this regime has been a call for many years from society, which previous governments have ignored.
The lawmaker also recalled that he has attempted to bring the topic to debate in the Legislative Assembly plenary, but this bid was rejected by the majority of the lawmakers that compose the hemicycle.