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)