Inspection on official websites brings results

The State Council released a notice recently on the outcome of a nationwide inspection of government websites conducted during the fourth quarter last year. As of Dec 1, a total of 24,820 government websites were in operation, including 1,961 run by departments under the State Council and 32 portal websites run by provincial-level governments. The General Office of the State Council conducted a random inspection of 460 websites and found that 95 percent met standards. Official websites of local governments of Beijing, Tianjin, Hainan province, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps were 100 percent qualified in four consecutive quarters. All provincial regions and 71 State Council departments randomly checked 12,336 websites under their administration, which accounted for 50 percent of government websites and scored an average qualification rate of 96 percent. In total, 14,208 valid messages were received to report errors on government websites in the fourth quarter, and 99 percent of them were responded to. For 25 websites selected from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Shanghai, Hunan province, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the ratio hit 100 percent. During this period, 116 officials were punished or received warnings for unqualified website operations. In 2017, all regions and departments had inspected 43,139 government websites at all levels. In the same year, 21,513 websites in poor maintenance were integrated or removed, including 18,318 sites for governments under the county level. The inspection also found 625 officials to be accountable for poorquality websites. Some problems arose in the inspection, such as casual domain names and logos, shortage of rectification measures, meager interaction with netizens and inadequate security control. Based on the outcomes, the notice said more efforts should be made to supervise government websites and provide better online governmental services. Governments at all levels should improve normal website supervision, carry out corrections, better interact with netizens to address their concerns, and advance security mechanisms to make sure government websites are safe and secure.