By Wong Chen
In this article, I will disclose my 2021 community budget and reveal what we intend to spend for 2022. My office has been practising full financial transparency and accountability since I was elected in 2013. Our six-monthly financial accounts are available in our published biannual newsletters. At every year-end, my office engages an external accountant to give a true and fair view of our accounts. Attached to this article, is our 2021 financial statements for your better perusal.
Recently, many homes in Taman Kinrara Seksyen 1 & 2 were hit by the 18th December 2021 floods. In some homes, flood waters reached up to waist level damaging properties and vehicles. My officers and I visited the affected areas and estimated that about 1,500 homes have been affected by the floods.
The weekend after the floods, we crafted a flood relief welfare programme for Taman Kinrara 1 & 2. We received a lot of applications over a period of two weeks. We also assisted the same victims to process applications for the Selangor state and federal government flood relief funds. In the final tally, we had 1,009 paper applications. I want to thank the seven volunteers that assisted in the data entry work of these applications which took four days to complete.
Thereafter, we requested and secured our 2022 financial allocation from the Implementation Coordination Unit (ICU). It took another week for the money to be deposited into our bank account. We also had to order a substantial amount of cheque books which took another three days to process. I then had to sign a lot of cheques. At time of writing this, we are now slated to complete the entire exercise on Saturday, 22nd January 2022. In totality, we have allocated RM403,600 for flood relief, giving RM400 of aid to each household in Taman Kinrara 1 & 2.
This flood relief programme has taken up 80.72% of our first tranche of RM500,000 community funds for 2022. The ICU will release our second tranche of RM500,000 only in April 2022. That being the case, we will only have a balance of RM96,400 from now till April 2022.
For 2022, my office will receive RM1.5 million for general community fund and another RM2 million for Projek Mesra Rakyat (PMR). The PMR fund is slated to be available by early February 2022. Under the PMR fund, my office intends to grant every public school in my constituency with an allocation of RM30,000 each. Since there are 51 public schools in Parliament Subang, I will be allocating RM1.53 million for all the Subang schools in 2022. In 2019, I gave a similar allocation to all schools and the majority of these went to repair toilets, roofs, walls, stairs and doors of schools. These repair works were not decided by my office but by the PIBG and teaching staff of each respective school, in a fully democratic and targeted manner.
As stated earlier, I have allocated RM403,600 for flood relief and another RM1.53 million for school repairs. Since my office will receive in totality RM3.5 million, we still have a balance of RM1.56 million to allocate. What I intend to do, is to provide grants to all associations in my constituency. These associations include but are not limited to JMBs, KRTs, mosques, temples, churches and any other registered community associations and societies. We aim to give a grant of RM2,000 to all such associations. From our previous records, there is an estimated 300 registered associations in our area. Therefore, the grants of RM2,000 for each association, will cost us about RM600,000. The final balance of RM960,000 will thus be reserved for ad hoc community small projects (RM470,000), social welfare assistance (RM190,000) and micro grants (RM300,000) to the B40 in Subang.
The above essentially describes our community spending priorities for the year 2022. I want to thank my chief volunteer Mr. Leong, my officers Bala, Cyrene and Dhaartshini for their inputs in crafting our 2022 community budget. Our officers will be running a multitude of grants and projects for the next 11 months. As a rule, we will cease all community spending by early December, allowing the last 2 to 3 weeks of December as a stock taking and audit process of our accounts.
I am aware that many Malaysians are extremely unhappy with the state of politics and are sick and tired of what politicians say but don’t practise. If we truly want to change Malaysia to be better and eliminate corruption, this mission must start from the politicians themselves. As a priority, politicians must fully disclose their office accounts and be accountable to the public.
I reiterate that my office practices full transparency and accountability, and on that note, I invite you to revisit our accounts as contained in our newsletters. These accounts since 2013 can be downloaded from my website; wongchen.com.
Lastly, I want to wish all my constituents a healthy, happy and prosperous Chinese New Year; Kung Hei Fatt Choi!
