Kenya Tightens Rules on Asset, Conflict of Interest Declarations

Kenya's public officials who fail to declare their income, assets, and liabilities could have their salaries stopped under a new enforcement framework issued by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) that gives government agencies a direct financial lever over compliance.

• The newly gazetted EACC mechanisms for implementing the Conflict of Interest Act, which replaced the Public Officer Ethics Act in July last year, move asset disclosure beyond a periodic filing exercise and create a system for tracking, reporting, and penalising state officers who do not comply.
• The rules allow responsible agencies to issue notices, warnings, initiate disciplinary proceedings or stop an officer’s salary until a required declaration is made. 
• For businesses dealing with the government, the separate rules on conflicts of interest may be just as significant.

An officer who has a conflict must declare it before or during a discussion, decision, debate or vote and recuse themselves. The recusal must be recorded in the minutes and depending on the circumstances, the officer can physically leave the proceedings or refrain from participating.

The recusal must then be transmitted to EACC within 60 days including details of the officer, the conflict, and how the officer recused themselves. That requirement creates a paper trail around decisions where private interests and public responsibilities intersect. In areas such as procurement, infrastructure and licensing, where government decisions can have large commercial consequences, a documented recusal can become important evidence of how a conflict of interest was handled.

Closing Administrative Gaps

The new rules mandate each responsible commission to maintain a register and send the EACC compliance reports showing which officers are required to declare, who submitted their declarations by the deadline and who did not. The register must also record action taken against non-compliant officers. That will create a formal trail around what has often been an obscure part of public administration: whether officials actually comply with financial disclosure requirements.

The new rules set out three principal declarations. An officer must make an initial declaration within 30 days of appointment, a biennial declaration by the end of December every second year, and a final declaration within 30 days of leaving office.

The disclosure extends beyond the officer personally as it also covers spouses and dependent children under 18, as well as foreign income, assets, and liabilities. Jointly held assets must be disclosed with the officer’s share identified and where spouses are both public officers, each must make a separate declaration.