Graft-buster calls for officials’ kin to disclose assets
Ex-audit chief targets ‘grey income’
Will Clem in Shanghai 12 March 2010
Former state auditor Li Jinhua has many times called for officials to publicly declare their personal assets. But yesterday he hit hard at the family angle, saying they also needed to quell public “dissatisfaction” by disclosing the assets of their offspring.
Li, vice-chairman of the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said in an interview with the People’s Daily broadcast on the internet that the growing wealth of top officials’ families “is what everybody is most dissatisfied about”.
“From the many cases currently coming to light, you can see that a lot of corruption problems are being passed through the sons and daughters,” he said.
Li said there were major obstacles to achieving full transparency and part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the mainland’s laws were not yet “completely established”.
“Many problems are not clearly defined in law, or it is very difficult at the moment to define them clearly.”
A key question was how to determine the circumstances when children’s incomes should be included.
If officials’ children were dependents, then they were unlikely to have any assets, he said. “On the other hand, if [the children] are independent and working, then what relationship does that have to the official? Should these assets be counted as part of the official’s assets?”
But he said it was clear “some officials” were using their offspring to beat the system. “If you look at them personally, their accounts or assets appear to be not too much, but many [of their] sons and daughters have really extensive assets,” he said. “This is particularly difficult to define.”
He said officials’ “grey income” and cash transactions on the side also made it increasingly difficult to tell who was on the take.
“For a time, when I was auditing, I would need to fill in only one form, which was wages. At the most there would be some external teaching fees,” he said. “But today, many officials have a lot of other grey incomes.
“Many of these incomes are not reported by the bank, and not reported by other parties either.”
He said it was clear from past corruption cases that the amount of personal incomes were far greater than the officials had previously reported, as many deals had been done with cash or through false identities.
Li, 66, is widely respected on the mainland for his clean image as a no-nonsense graft-buster, having served as auditor general of the National Audit Office between 1998 and 2008.
He was named Person of the Year by the Guangzhou paper Southern Weekend for bringing to light widespread ministerial financial irregularities when he made the audit office’s reports public for the first time in 2003. That period became known as the “audit storm”, but Li said it was unlikely another squall would rock the mainland’s finances.
“Auditing work is carrying out an audit according to the law,” he said. “There can’t be any major change to the guiding principles of auditing ... I don’t know if you can use the ‘audit storm’ as a standard.”
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Graft-buster calls for officials’ kin to disclose assets
Ex-audit chief targets ‘grey income’
Will Clem in Shanghai
12 March 2010
Former state auditor Li Jinhua has many times called for officials to publicly declare their personal assets. But yesterday he hit hard at the family angle, saying they also needed to quell public “dissatisfaction” by disclosing the assets of their offspring.
Li, vice-chairman of the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, said in an interview with the People’s Daily broadcast on the internet that the growing wealth of top officials’ families “is what everybody is most dissatisfied about”.
“From the many cases currently coming to light, you can see that a lot of corruption problems are being passed through the sons and daughters,” he said.
Li said there were major obstacles to achieving full transparency and part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the mainland’s laws were not yet “completely established”.
“Many problems are not clearly defined in law, or it is very difficult at the moment to define them clearly.”
A key question was how to determine the circumstances when children’s incomes should be included.
If officials’ children were dependents, then they were unlikely to have any assets, he said. “On the other hand, if [the children] are independent and working, then what relationship does that have to the official? Should these assets be counted as part of the official’s assets?”
But he said it was clear “some officials” were using their offspring to beat the system. “If you look at them personally, their accounts or assets appear to be not too much, but many [of their] sons and daughters have really extensive assets,” he said. “This is particularly difficult to define.”
He said officials’ “grey income” and cash transactions on the side also made it increasingly difficult to tell who was on the take.
“For a time, when I was auditing, I would need to fill in only one form, which was wages. At the most there would be some external teaching fees,” he said. “But today, many officials have a lot of other grey incomes.
“Many of these incomes are not reported by the bank, and not reported by other parties either.”
He said it was clear from past corruption cases that the amount of personal incomes were far greater than the officials had previously reported, as many deals had been done with cash or through false identities.
Li, 66, is widely respected on the mainland for his clean image as a no-nonsense graft-buster, having served as auditor general of the National Audit Office between 1998 and 2008.
He was named Person of the Year by the Guangzhou paper Southern Weekend for bringing to light widespread ministerial financial irregularities when he made the audit office’s reports public for the first time in 2003. That period became known as the “audit storm”, but Li said it was unlikely another squall would rock the mainland’s finances.
“Auditing work is carrying out an audit according to the law,” he said. “There can’t be any major change to the guiding principles of auditing ... I don’t know if you can use the ‘audit storm’ as a standard.”
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