This was according to State Councillor Wang Zhongyu Thursday at a national auditing conference in Beijing.

The three-day conference, the first of its kind, was aimed at enforcing auditing by covering more high-level officials, said auditor-general Li Jinhua.

"During employment'' and "leaving the job'' auditing is an important method of staving off corruption,'' he said. "All the problems in China's financial affairs relate in some way or other to leaders' abuse of power.''

China has begun to audit officials at and below county level nationwide as well as the heads of all state-owned or state-holding enterprises.

Li said great achievements have been made in such auditing.

Statistics show that 2,630 cities and counties launched such auditing on Party or government officials, and between 1998 and June this year, 2,591 started auditing state-owned enterprise leaders. Forty-two thousand Party and government leaders and 15,000 business leaders have been audited since 1998. Among them, 200 were sacked, 470 were admonished or punished - for example, they were fined - and 1,010 cases were considered bad enough that they were transferred to legal departments to be dealt with, he said.

The illegal behaviour of individuals concerning 590 million yuan (US$71 million) was ferreted out.

Through auditing individual leaders, corruption in their workplaces was also discovered. Since 1998, corruption at work concerning 96.17 billion yuan (US$11.59 billion) has been exposed, Li said.

Such auditing also provided a reliable reference for the personnel department when appointing leaders, he said.

Seeing the great effect of auditing, the state is determined to do it even more to cover more officials, even high-ranking ones.

Since April this year, the National Audit Office has audited the leaders of six major financial institutions when they left their posts. These firms included the four state-owned commercial banks. Li said the auditing results have been handed over to the State Council.

In the coming weeks, auditing will be spread to cover all leaders at or below county levels.

Some leaders above county level will be audited on a trial basis, he said.

The auditing of the leaders of state-owned enterprises will also be more widespread.

Meanwhile, new auditing regulations will be laid down and existing ones will be upgraded.

(China Daily 10/27/2000)