The Chinese government continued to deepen the reform to
separate the management of revenue from that of expenditures in
2003 and brought 118 administrative charges collected by 30
government departments and institutions under budgetary control,
Finance Minister Jin Renqing said Saturday.
These government establishments included the former Ministry of
Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation and the Ministry of
Personnel, Jin said in a budget report delivered at the annual
session of the National People's Congress (NPC), the national
legislature.
The reform was further deepened to introduce departmental
budgets by requiring more departments to submit increasingly
standardized budgets to the NPC. Trial reforms to set the level of
basic expenditures and fix the allowed number of employees and
funding were extended to 118 more secondary institutions under the
central government.
The government also intensified the reform to introduce the
system of centralized treasury revenue and payments, expanding the
trial implementation of the system of centralized treasury payments
from the 42 central departments in 2002 to 82 in 2003.
According to Jin, the scope of government procurement continued
to expand, with total government procurement exceeding 150 billion
yuan in 2003, 50 billion yuan more than the previous year.
With the efforts to tighten the supervision and auditing of
budgetary funds, an amount of 61.2 billion yuan was verified as
being obtained through acts that violated financial regulations and
discipline last year, said Jin.
(Xinhua News Agency March 6, 2004)
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