For 13 months running, the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC) has submitted blank reports on overseas study-tour spending to the Legislative Yuan — bad news for anyone trying to monitor how the government spends money.

• The fourth-quarter expenditure execution table on overseas study tours that the OCAC sent to the Legislative Yuan was almost entirely empty, using little more than a hundred characters to explain that there is no budget item called "study tours".
• The OCAC's explanation is that its overseas travel budget is divided into only three categories — "inspections", "visits" and "meetings" — and that no "study tour" budget has ever been drawn up in any year, which is why the table is blank.
• Chen I-hsin, director of the Kuomintang's Culture and Communications Committee, criticised this as playing word games with accounting categories, turning disclosure of information into a blank page, and demanded an apology from Acting Minister Li Yen-hui.
• Chen also called for the publication, within a set deadline, of the accounts, itineraries and results of all official overseas trips over the past 13 months.
• Hsu Chiao-hsin, convener of the Foreign and National Defense Committee, asked that expenditure execution tables for all three categories — "inspections", "visits" and "meetings" — be submitted for review as well, and the OCAC said it was willing to provide them.

Outlook: The details of the past 13 months of overseas travel spending will only become clear once the supplementary material is handed over, and the political wrangling is unlikely to end any time soon.