President Xi Jinping sent out a central task force on Monday, April 18, to expand the program on four other provincial-level areas: Chongqing, Guangdong, Beijing and Xinjiang. (Photo : Getty Images)
Authorities in China have declared the disqualification of over 3,900 officials from promotion after misreporting their assets in 2015, the Global Times reported.
According to the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, officials at the deputy county level must annually report personal information to the party. The report encompasses personal and family assets, investments, overseas travel and nationality and occupation of relatives.
When the reporting system was first adopted in the late '90s, there was no mechanism to enforce compliance until in 2015, when changes were made to reflect certain punishments when not in compliance with the report.
Ye Qing, a deputy director of the statistics bureau of Central China's Hubei Province, said that officials need to be more precise when reporting their assets as authorities are now stricter in monitoring compliance.
"You couldn't just write down a rough estimate of the area of your house like you did in previous years. The figure had to be down to several digits after the decimal point," said Ye.
"In past years, people could still submit their reports after they missed the deadline. But now they are not allowed to submit them again and get punishment right away if they miss it," said He Wenkai, a deputy procurator-general of the Fangchenggang People's Procuratorate in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Ye also stated that although private vehicles are excluded in current asset declaration forms in Hubei, this may change sooner than expected. "To prevent people bribing officials with vehicles, the system should include vehicles in the next phase," Ye said.
For Hu Xingdou, a political science professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, art collections should also be included in the system since many corrupt officials have been found to have smuggled and collected works of art in the past.
An example of this is Liu Zhijun, former railway minister, who was given a suspended death penalty in 2013 and received art worth 13 million yuan ($2 million), according to the Procuratorial Daily.
To curb graft, officials should disclose their assets to the public as well as the Party, said Zhu Lijia, a public management professor at the Chinese Academy of Governance.
