China's auditing work is getting ever more transparent, which in turn is greatly improving the governments' efficiency in fighting corruption. An auditing report publicized recently by the National Auditing Office exposes some corruption scandals concerning government officials and some state-owned enterprises. It has attracted wide public attention. 
 
The National Auditing Office recently submitted a report to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislative body. The report, which has been publicized, exposes some corruption scandals concerning the diverting of government funds, the illegal operations of some financial institutions and the officials involved.

Before this April, making such a report available to the public was virtually unthinkable. So many cases concerning corruption were not discovered by the government departments concerned, but sometimes by the people involved voluntarily admitting their guilt and sometimes by reports from ordinary citizens. As Professor Ren Jianming from Tsinghua University says, the reform has a very significant meaning for the improvement of government auditing.

"The publication of the national auditing report is very important for our anti-corruption work. It symbolizes a new system is beginning to play a role in our building a clean government."

With the auditing reform, more and more corruption scandals are being revealed through auditing. The professor says this shows that China's anti-corruption work is moving from a combination of education and punishment and becoming more systematic. The professor stresses that, besides a preventative role, the auditing system can also help to greatly improve the public finance system, and thereby strengthen the fight against corruption.

"To more efficiently prevent corruption, I think we still need to focus on two things: one is to make our public finance system more open and transparent, the other is our auditing departments' need to more independently supervise government finance."

With a more and more open auditing system and increasing public supervision of government work, the professor believes a more systematized and cleaner government will be realized in the near future.

(CRI July 6, 2004)