A “clerical error” wiped out around a quarter of the Standards Commissioner’s planned budget for last year. 

The newly set up Office of the Commissioner for Standards in Public Life had to make do with a budget of €350,000, after some €128,000 slipped through the cracks due to the mistake. 

According to the commissioner’s annual report, the error happened when the draft budget plan was presented to the Finance Ministry through the House of Representatives for vetting.

The office kept its staff complement to six last year and restricted operational and maintenance expenditure to the essentials to make good for the loss.

Contacted by Times of Malta, Standards Commissioner George Hyzler admitted the shortfall in funds allocated did delay the projected staff recruitment, however the office still managed to cope “well enough” with the number of complaints it received. Hyzler said additional funds were allocated to cover part of the shortfall.

According to the annual report, the Finance Ministry made an additional €18,000 available to the commissioner. 

“In reality, 2019 was our first year of operation and although we did hit the ground running and were fully functional by mid-January, the volume of work at that time allowed us to operate with less staff than projected,” Hyzler told Times of Malta.

The commissioner said this year, his office was allocated with the full amount requested.

One of the commissioner’s major investigations last year was intothe potential conflicts of interest in having government backbenchers and opposition MPs on the government payroll.

The commissioner found that all backbench MPs on the government side had been engaged by the government in one capacity or another, mainly as consultants to ministries, chairpersons or members of government boards, or members of staff in ministers’ secretariats.

In his case report, the commissioner concluded that this practice was fundamentally wrong for various reasons, the most important of which was that it undermined the ability of parliament to hold the executive to account. He recommended that the practice should cease.

The government had rebutted the report, arguing that engaging backbench MPs was neither unconstitutional nor illegal, and did not represent a conflict of interest.

This year, the commissioner proposed that ministers, parliamentary secretaries and other public officials should be barred from acting as lobbyists for a period of time after they cease to hold office.

Additionally, it has been proposed that top public officials register all communication with lobbyists, including meetings, in a transparency registry.