Mystifying budgets fuel graft, says magazine
Beijing's shoddy budget system has helped breed widespread official corruption, a leading mainland magazine reported yesterday, signalling the leadership is under increasing pressure to make it more transparent.
In its annual budgets - the latest of which will be presented to the annual session of the National People's Congress next month - the central government had shown neither prudence nor fiscal responsibility, according to an article in the latest edition of Outlook magazine, which is published by Xinhua.
The central and local governments' budgets are usually vague documents that do not go into great detail. This made it hard to check how funds were spent and gave crooked officials many loopholes to exploit, the report said.
A lack of transparency in the budget-making process had also led to huge losses of public funds. Although governments at all levels must submit their budgets to the national or regional people's congresses for review, the legislative bodies at best only had a rough idea of where the money went.
'For instance, they generally know how much goes to education or public health, but not in great detail. So exactly where the money trickles down to remains a mystery,' the report said. Off-budget funds were also common and sometimes exceeded the figure listed on the official budget sheet, making it easy for corrupt officials to commit fraud.
The NPC has called for greater efforts to reform the budget process. The article said one way to prevent budget-related corruption would be to set up an accountability system for particular projects.
Pilot programmes aimed at injecting more transparency into the budget process have been carried out in several provinces, including Guangdong.
Late last year the provincial government submitted to the local legislature a detailed budget plan that aimed to monitor each project.
