Provincial Party secretaries will soon be asked to submit to financial audits, part of a new drive to weed out corruption from the upper ranks of local governments.
It is the first time such powerful officials will be part of government-sanctioned audits although officials are routinely audited.
Sun Baohou, the general auditor of the National Audit Office (NAO), discussed the plan during an online chat with the public Tuesday on www.gov.cn, a government website. He said the pilot project will be ongoing but did not provide a timetable.
The general office of the CPC Central Committee and the general office of the State Council last week released audit regulations on reviewing the finances of Party leaders, government officials, and administrators of State-owned enterprises (SOE). The rules say officials at all levels in the local government will face audits.
Sun said the audit of State institutions and enterprises will focus on whether there is any financial transactions, and whether officials report their incomes accurately.
Sun said that county-level officials have already been audited, but the effort to audit city-level and provincial-level officials are at the pilot stage. Provincial Party secretaries, who are the most senior provincial officials, have never been audited before.
The NAO has completed audits of 53 provincial and ministerial officials from 2000 to 2010 during the pilot project, Sun said, without giving their names, or how many of them were suspected of wrongdoing.
More than 410,000 leading Party members, including CPC Party leaders, government officials and SOE managers were audited since 1998. Those audits revealed that more than 68.4 billion yuan ($10.2 billion) were misused.
Some 18,100 officials were demoted or dismissed as a result, Sun said.
Liu Zhuozhi, vice chairman of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government, was under investigation over alleged severe violation of discipline, the CPC's discipline watchdog confirmed Wednesday.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC did not give further details, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
There are about 4,000 to 5,000 provincial and ministerial officials nationwide and just 53 were audited, Wang Yukai, a professor of anti-corruption research at the Chinese Academy of Governance, told the Global Times.
Wang said the NAO should release more information to the public about the results of those audits.
"The NAO just said that there were 53 provincial and ministerial level officials being audited, but it didn't give the public new information about those officials, which did not satisfy people," Wang said.
Sun said that audit findings would be handed over to the local CPC Party Committee and the local government for further investigation.
Wang told the Global Times Wednesday that audits of provincial Party officials could be troubling unless new oversight rules to regulate the process are introduced.
Some provincial Party officials carry higher ranks than the Minister of the National Audit Office, Wang said. "The auditing of high-ranking officials will be difficult if the auditing process is not supported by relevant policies."
