China's Auditor-General Li Jinhua has said that embezzlement and fraud
were found in central budget implementation after completion of the audit of the
2003 budget implementation in 55 ministries and commissions under the State
Council.
In an auditing work report on implementation of the 2003 central budget to a
meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC)
Wednesday, Li disclosed that seven ministries obtained a total of 96.73 million
yuan by cheating on their number of work staff and fabricating construction
projects.
The auditing work report also said altogether 41 ministries andcommissions
under the State Council embezzled as much as 1.42 billion yuan of funds
dedicated to special projects and used to construct residence and office
buildings for their own departments.
Li raised an example, saying that since 1999, the State GeneralAdministration
of Sport embezzled 131 million yuan from the country's Olympic special funds for
building its own residential community, distributing subsidies to officials and
opening up its own companies.
Li said in his report that insufficient use of the central budget was another
big problem. By the end of 2003, the Ministry of Finance allocated 3.114 billion
yuan for their budgeted construction projects. However, only 1.261 billion yuan
was used, leaving another 1.853 billion yuan or 64.74 percent unused.
