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 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 and commissions 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 General Administration 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.

(People's Daily  June 24, 2004)