Ministries respond to key public concerns

Central ministries and departments have responded to a series of public concerns, mainly including affordable housing and medical advertisement management.

Affordable housing auditing

China’s National Audit Office revealed a recent round of auditing over the country’s government-subsidized housing projects on June 24, also known as the affordable housing program, a project designed to provide housing for people with low incomes to make their dwelling more affordable.

The audit, running from December 2016 to March 2017, covers government-subsidized housing projects across 31 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions, among which 17,200 projects were comprehensively investigated. The review mainly targets housing projects started in 2016.

This has been the office’s fifth round of auditing on the country’s affordable housing projects.

Officials from the National Audit Office told at a news briefing late in June that in general, in 2016, the construction of affordable housing played an important role in improving people’s livelihoods and promoting urbanization, creating proper living conditions for urban residents with low incomes and driving development of related industries.

Meanwhile, key problems were also detected in this round of audit. Some regions and departments still have problems such as lack of strict management of the housing funds and failure to strictly implement the affordable housing policy. These problems take various forms, such as fund embezzlement and poor infrastructure quality of housing projects. Also, affordable housing projects were found to be provided to families that do not fall into groups of residents eligible for such subsidiaries.

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