Article 9 of the Enforcement Rules for the Administrative Enforcement Act provides that when making administrative enforcement a written record shall be prepared. Article 26 of the Administrative Enforcement Act allows the use, mutatis mutandis, of the provisions of Article 30-1 of the Compulsory Enforcement Act and Article 219 of the Code of Civil Procedures as evidence for judging the observance of administrative enforcement procedure. This indicates the importance of a written record in administrative enforcement procedure.

After the branch offices of the Agency of Administrative Enforcement (AAE) were established in 2001, written records were made by judicial clerks with the use of ink and pen. As their writing could not always keep up with the speed of the oral questions and answers, they had to resort to overly cursive writing and elapses, making the record intelligible and even disputable. In order to improve the speed and the quality of written records, make them easy to read, ensure the rights of interested parties, and raise government agency’s credibility image, it is necessary to use computers for the purpose.

Under Director Chang’s leadership, AAE went all out to push the program and asked various branch offices to speak out their hardware and software difficulties and the companion measures they would need. Besides solving their difficulties, AAE designated its Shilin and Taiwan branch offices as trial units for a period from Mach 1 to August 31, 2015. The result was good. To ensure the smooth implementation of the program, AAE called the representatives of its various branch offices into a meeting, where some participants raised the question of Chinese typing training for judicial clerks and the format of computerized written records. After extensive discussion, AAE drafted the Key Point for Computerizing Written Records. With the approval by the Ministry of Justice, the program was formally launched on June 1, 2015. The document has two highlights:

1. A judicial clerk shall use a computer to type enforcement records (except those of auctions) and this stipulation for the moment is not applicable to written records made outside of AAE in view of the insufficiency of equipment and companion measures.

2. In order to improve the efficiency of making written records with computers, branch offices shall provide judicial clerks with Chinese typing training and hold tests in every season. The AAE statistics office shall provide them with the test software. The test shall adopt the system of typing by watching the text. The method of typing is not limited. High achievers will be rewarded and absence of the clerks who miss out the test twice without justifiable reasons will be taken into consideration when his or her performance is evaluated.

By comparison with the law courts and the prosecutors’ offices, AAE’s branch offices lag behind by nearly 10 years in the use of computers for preparing written records. This is because the AAE branch offices were not established until 2001 and their duties are enforcement while the duties of courts and prosecutors’ offices are about investigation. On the other hand, an AAE written record is about the questions and answers between an AAE officer and a payment delinquent, which is a bilateral relationship, while in a court or a prosecutors’ office it is a three-party relationship, involving the defendant, the plaintiff and the judge or prosecutor. Still, AAE has taken this courgeous action in view of the world trend and the need for burnishing its image as a government agency. It is believed that action will be helpful to its operations.