China's National Audit Office recovered 14.82 billion yuan (US$1.79 billion) last year after auditing more than 130,000 work units across the country, Auditor-General Li Jinhua said Friday at a national conference in Beijing.  

Auditors helped to save 1.01 billion yuan (US$122 million) in budgetary allocations and subsidies and returned 9.07 billion yuan (US$1.1 billion) to allocating bodies.

They also forwarded 1,867 cases to prosecution and disciplinary authorities, including 13 major cases involving more than 1 billion yuan (US$121 million) that were directly reported to the State Council.

Li said the financial malpractice fell into three main categories:

l         Units and individuals cheating on individual consumption loans, such as housing and car loans, with false documents, and local governments applying for huge city building loans beyond their repayment abilities.

l         Enterprises cheating on huge loans by writing false bank acceptance bills without any real trading.

l         Criminals colluding with bank employees in fraudulently obtaining loans involving affiliated enterprises, causing serious credit fund losses.

Li said the office also organized economic liability audits of leading members of the former state-run National Power Corporation last year, finding that slack management had caused serious state assets losses.

Audits of the implementation of central budgets were another focus as uncovering problems in the distribution and management of the budgets and subsidies from the central government for local expenditure was always a priority, Li said.

(Xinhua News Agency January 31, 2004)