 |
Auditors Tighten Noose on Nation's Embezzlers
Dubbed economic policemen, State auditors hope that after three years of tightened supervision, ministries of the central government will be free of major capital embezzlement.
Li Jinhua, auditor-general of the National Audit Office, said Thursday that auditors must play a bigger role in the country's anti-graft drive.
"My final goal is that whenever and however we audit them (government departments), we will find no problems at all, instead of big ones," he said.
Between January and November last year, auditors checked a total of 100,000 units across the country, uncovering 959 economic crimes leading to the recouping of 19.2 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion) in embezzled funds.
"We shall put our emphasis on discovering really big and serious cases," he told a national auditing conference that opened Thursday. "Our focus will be on false accounts, tax evasion, smuggling, evasion of bank debts and embezzlement of fiscal capital and State assets."
The central government, which has listed cleaning up economic operations as one of the major tasks for this year, is pinning high hopes on auditing supervision.
Li noted that the reinforced supervision in the past few years has helped ministries under the State Council improve their internal control systems and their ability to manage their budgets.
"The number of violations has been declining in recent years," he said.
In 1999, the Ministry of Water Resources was found to have misused about 400 million yuan (US$48 million) originally earmarked for building water supply facilities. Some of the money was used to build its office buildings.
Some other ministries, such as the Ministry of Finance, were also found to have misappropriated some of their 1999 budget funds.
"The auditing departments have made serious effort to correct these problems," Li said.
Under tightened auditing supervision, many ministries, such as the Ministry of Information Industry, the Ministry of Land Resources, and the Civil Aviation Administration of China, have made major improvements in financial management.
Li also urged auditors to keep a sharp eye on assets embezzlement in the new round of government re-organization under which several industrial administrative bureaux will be terminated.
"Some illegal assets transfers may happen during such a process," Li said.
He also listed auditing State enterprises and financial departments as key tasks for State auditors this year.
Source: China Daily
In This Section
|