Lin Min

    LITTLE has changed in government budget transparency since the Shanghai city government attracted public ire last year by refusing a citizen’s request to disclose its budget, saying such information was a “State secret.”

    Shanghai is not the only Chinese city that keeps its account books closed to taxpayers. Without due public scrutiny, government departments are exposed by the media as big spenders from time to time. The financial bureau in Fushun City, Liaoning Province, was reported to be procuring iPod Touch 4 earlier this month purportedly to be used as memory devices.

    iPod Touch 4 is an entertainment gadget costing about 2,400 yuan (US$360) (for 32G), while a USB memory stick of the same capacity can be purchased for between 200 and 500 yuan. The procurement plan has understandably led to a new wave of public uproar, forcing the bureau to halt the purchase. The bureau’s ridiculous defense that the Apple gadget was chosen because it was more reliable than memory sticks was widely regarded a thinly veiled attempt to cover up the misuse of public funds.

    The iPod-for-government saga once again raised the stubborn issue of budget transparency in China.

    Ironically, the public would never have known of the intended purchase if the media had not dug into a bidding notice for government procurements. Most of the time, taxpayers around the country are kept in the dark as to how their money is spent. Taxpayers don’t even know how many cars local governments own.

    Because of a lack of public supervision, waste and misuse of public money is believed to be worsening over the years as the government coffers swell. Ye Qing, vice chief of the Hubei Provincial Statistics Bureau, told a legislative session earlier this year that the maintenance bill for an unidentified government vehicle was 100,000 yuan; another car used 40 tires a year — that means almost one new tire a week! Even the world’s most diligent public servant could not use so many tires driving to serve the people 24 hours a day 365 days a year nonstop.

    These are only two cases Ye discovered in a Central Government report on public spending. He also found that administrative expenditure had grown by 100 billion yuan a year in the past five years. Spending by the country’s civil servants accounted for one-fourth of national revenue, he said. Wining and dining on public money has also long been a source of public dissatisfaction. In 2006, a government auditor in Hebei drunk himself to his death at a dinner with people from the institution he was auditing.

    The only way to prevent officials squandering taxpayer money is to make government budgets more accessible and transparent. Although China promulgated the Open Information Regulations in 2008, local governments have been reluctant to publicize budgets.

    The financial bureaus of Bao’an and Longgang districts early this year published their budgets for the first time. These have been praised as meaningful first steps toward greater transparency and accountability. However, more budget details need to be disclosed before the public can really supervise government spending. The Bao’an budget gives only broad figures. For example, it states the salary expenditure of 11.58 million yuan, but stops short of specifying the number of bureau staff.

    Some Central Government ministries this year also began to release budgets but, just like the Bao’an and Longgang budgets, these departmental budgets provide few details. Each is only about a page long, and breaks up revenue and expenditure into several broad categories. In comparison, the budget for South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology runs to 32 pages, according to the Wall Street Journal. In Hong Kong, the public has access to government budget details as “trivial” as a chair.

    Asked when the Bao’an bureau would come up with more details, a bureau official said there were no regulations stipulating what budget information the government was obliged to disclose.

    What the official said presents a new task for the country’s lawmakers: a budget transparency law. We don’t want a Chinese WikiLeaks to allow taxpayers to learn how the government spends their money, do we? Those who pay the bills have a right to know.

    (The author is editor of the Shenzhen Daily News Desk.)