Important for local govts to stop cooking the books

To better coordinate government policies and predict and prevent risks, accurate information is indispensible. President Xi Jinping has stressed on many occasions that accurate statistics are the lifeline for the government’s work and the truthfulness of data must be guaranteed. That some of the lower-level governments in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region have cooked the books when reporting their budgetary incomes and industrial output, inflating the autonomous region’s budgetary incomes by 53 billion yuan ($8.17 billion) and industrial output by 290 billion yuan, has led to the statistics department of the autonomous region trimming the region’s GDP for 2016, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency.

It has also led to the region calling a halt to the building of some railway projects and other government-subsidized programs.

And this is not the first such case of local governments massaging statistics. Jilin province was discovered to be falsifying its statistics during an inspection early last year.

Not only does such falsifying of growth-related statistics by local authorities mislead regional and central governments’ decisionmaking, the exposing of padded data also dents investors’ confidence since it casts a shadow on the overall integrity of the local governments concerned.

As the world’s second-largest economy, China must continue to make efforts to improve the authority of its statistics to assure global investors that it is capable of providing a clean and reliable environment for their investments.

Given the seriousness of the problem, therefore, those responsible for fabricating data must be punished in accordance with law and regulations.

However, on the up side, the candidness of the Inner Mongolia authorities in revealing the reporting problems points to the improved working attitude of provincial-level governments, since the nation has strengthened the disciplinary and legal punishments for corrupt officials and those who have proved to be incompetent.

A number of senior officials have been netted in the country’s anti-corruption campaigns in recent years and more lower-level officials and public servants have been punished for their failure to properly carry out their duties, moves that have greatly improved the work of governments at all levels and made them more willing to squarely face the problems that exist rather than trying to sweep them under the rug.

And since the problem of local government debt has become a major challenge to the country’s financial stability, the decision of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region to stop some construction projects and lower government debt levels sends a positive message that local governments are more aware of the debt problem and willing to act in accordance with the central government’s priority of preventing financial risks.