Transparency is critical to democratic health.

This year has seen a sad run of deceit in political funding. One scandal involved an unreported donation of 100 million yen to the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's largest faction, then headed by former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto. Besides that covert exchange, it has been revealed that the LDP's headquarters has served as a conduit for dubious contributions to individual politicians from corporations and other organizations.

These sordid tales have reinforced the ingrained public perception that much political funding remains shrouded in secrecy.

Amid such public cynicism, the official fund-raising reports for 2003 were submitted by political organizations.

More than 80,000 organizations exist in Japan that are involved in political fund-raising. They are legally required to provide financial reports, which constitute an enormous amount of information about political money flows. The accounts they submit to authorities, however, provide few hints to puzzling out the whole picture. Even if they are written according to the law and untainted by outright deception like that of the former Hashimoto faction, these reports still leave a lot unrevealed. Even a key element-how much money each lawmaker raised and how it was spent-is not clear.

Take LDP lawmakers, for example. They usually have an independent organization for political fund management. However, they also serve as the head of local party chapters. Their fund-raising through these organizations can only be roughly grasped by analyzing data about their money flows. The big picture is still blurred.

Many lawmakers operate other funding vehicles. The problem is the reports of such organizations don't say which lawmakers they are serving.

Another problem concerns the more than 7,500 local chapters of the LDP. That translates into 25 branches per single-seat district for the Lower House. They are used as convenient channels for receiving donations from companies and other organizations, which are prohibited by law from contributing money to individual politicians.

In addition, organizations that operate across prefectural borders are required to report their money flows to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, while the rest are required to submit their reports to prefectural governments. This divided jurisdiction exacerbates the effort to trace political funds.

Last year, the LDP received a total of 15.4 billion yen from the government under a subsidy program for political parties introduced as a step to remove special-interest money from politics. That accounted for 60 percent of the party's overall income. The opposition Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) depends on the subsidy for more than 80 percent of its revenue. While receiving a huge amount of taxpayer money, political parties still are lukewarm about disclosing funding information. This disrespect for taxpayers over their demands for clean and open political funding must end.

What should be done? First, politicians must be required to sum up all donations they receive through various organizations and disclose them. Their revenues and expenditures should be published on the Internet.

If it's going to take a lot of time to radically overhaul the current system, one step that can be taken immediately is to post on the Internet all data concerning political donations included in the reports submitted to both the ministry and prefectures.

Politicians clearly have an obligation to report all their political fund-raising activities to voters to maintain the health of democracy. Under the current system, politicians report their money collection and spending only to the authorities, while public access to the information held by the authorities is subject to regulatory restrictions. This is far from effective disclosure.

A proposal to revise the law regulating political donations made no significant progress during the autumn extraordinary Diet session. The prospect of major progress during the regular session next year is also bleak.

If so, the Diet should consider setting up an independent organization to press for greater transparency in political funding.

Ad hoc organizations to tackle tough issues have been founded before. One notable example is the council for election reform. It is vital to break the political impasse over the issue caused by the standoff between the ruling and opposition camps.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 26(IHT/Asahi: December 27,2004)