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Nation May Use Public Audit Firms
Public accounting firms are expected to be invited this year to help reinforce the country's auditing supervision.
Li Jinhua, auditor-general of the National Audit Office, noted Thursday that the central government's rising workload may prompt him to offer jobs to the firms.
The 80,000-strong auditing team finds it tough to audit all the government departments, officials, financial sector, State-owned enterprises and uses of various special funds and foreign loans.
Big domestic firms are likely to be invited first because they are cheaper than international auditing outfits.
But with this change, supervision of public accounting firms also must be strengthened, State Councilor Wang Zhongyu said at a national auditing conference that opened Thursday in Beijing.
Some firms have poor quality and have helped audited enterprises make false reports.
To better use the limited auditing force, Wang noted more attention should be put on digging deep in problems and discovering clues for big embezzlements.
Li listed auditing of the financial departments and State-owned enterprises as key tasks for auditors this year.
The office will organize auditing on income and expenditures of the People's Bank of China this year.
Assets and liabilities of the Bank of China, People's Insurance Co of China and China Life Insurance Co will also be inspected.
Auditing in the financial sector last year discovered such problems as fake financial reports, violation operation and poor quality of credit assets.
On auditing of State-owned enterprises, Li stressed that the focus will be put on checking quality of their assets and authenticity of their accounting reports.
Although China has successfully bailed out most of its large and medium-sized State-owned enterprises, auditing reports revealed that the assets quality of these enterprises remained to be far from satisfactory.
The National Audit Office audited 1,290 State-owned or State-controlled enterprises in 2000, some of which were found to have low assets quality and make false accounts, Li said at the conference.
The enterprises were found to have total non-performing assets of 74.3 billion yuan (US$8.9 billion), or 11 per cent of their total assets.
Moreover, accounts of about two-thirds of the enterprises could not reflect their financial situation and management results.
State assets loss was serious in some enterprises.
Of the audited enterprises, 22.9 billion yuan (US$2.76 billion) of State assets -- accounting for 3.4 per cent of the total -- were lost to evasion of bank debts and non-standardized joint-stock reform.
He added that his office will investigate the use of foreign government loans in a bid to discover major problems.
"We are going to construct a complete database for projects that use loans from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank," he said.
Source: China Daily
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