KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 12): Malaysia should immediately reform the Whistleblower Protection Act 2010 (WPA), and implement other long-overdue legal changes, an anti-graft watchdog said on Tuesday.

In particular, the legislation also known as Act 711 does not cover disclosures that offend other laws, such as the Official Secrets Act 1972, Transparency International Malaysia (TI-M) said in a statement. Protection will also be revoked if the whistleblower is involved in the wrongdoing being disclosed, it noted.

“There have been efforts from civil society and internally within the government to upgrade the WPA to remove or amend these two troubling provisions, and TI-M hopes there will be no further delay in this regard,” it said.

TI-M’s statement comes following a Malaysiakini news report of an audio clip, in which a politician was allegedly discussing the bribe he had received to support a project in his state.

The politician was not identified, though the lawyer of the whistleblower has met with the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission requesting legal protection, the news portal reported, citing the agency’s chief commissioner Tan Sri Azam Baki.

“This anxiety of the whistleblower is understandable and stems from the troubling provisions” in the current whistleblowing law, TI-M said.

Various public consultations have been conducted by the government, and stakeholders have published their own reports and recommendations in the past 14 years about the flaws that hinder effective whistleblowing, yet the draft amendment has yet to see the light of day, according to TI-M.

In March, Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Law and Institutional Reform) M Kulasegaran said the government was studying and evaluating amendments to Act 711, which are expected to be tabled in the Dewan Rakyat this year.