China will begin conducting spot checks this year on assets and other personal information reported by officials to the ruling Communist Party and punish those with hidden wealth

China to carry out spot checks on officials’ asset declarations

Fri, Jan 3 2014

BEIJING (Reuters) – China will begin conducting spot checks this year on assets and other personal information reported by officials to the ruling Communist Party and punish those with hidden wealth, state media reported.The internal declarations are not made public, and in the past a lack of oversight had largely reduced the system to a formality.

However, the government has faced increased public pressure to improve transparency around officials’ wealth, following a wave of scandals involving assets ranging from luxury watches to houses.

The party’s internal income declaration system for dates back to 1995, and officials have been required to submit a broader range of information including personal income, family assets and relatives’ emigration records for the past three years.

This year, the party’s powerful organization and personnel departments will conduct random sampling of the information submitted, to check if it is truthful and complete, the official Xinhua news agency said late on Thursday.

They will also pay closer attention to the declarations submitted by officials set for promotion, Xinhua added.

Routine declarations for this year will be submitted in January. Officials who do not report on time or truthfully will face punishments including sacking, Xinhua said.

“The most prominent feature of this declaration is that it reflects a strict administering of the party and officials,” Xinhua cited an unnamed official as saying.

With the exception of a few pilot programs, the party has shown little interest in wanting to set up a nationwide system to publicly disclose officials’ wealth, and instead has arrested several activists who urged this.

President Xi Jinping has launched a sweeping crackdown on corruption since taking power, vowing to pursue high-flying “tigers” as well as lowly “flies”, saying graft is so serious it could threaten the party’s very survival.

New foreign assets rule comes into force

Global Times | Fang Yang
Published on January 02, 2014 00:53

A series of new laws and regulations took effect Wednesday, the first day of the New Year, including revamped regulations on overseas asset declaration and transfers within China.
Under the new rule, Chinese citizens and organizations need to declare any overseas financial assets and liabilities. Foreign individuals and organizations that make economic business transactions on Chinese territory are also required to declare their international receipts and payments to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE).
If transactions are made through an agent, it will declare them.
The existing rules, put in place in 1995 by the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, only require declarations of economic transactions between Chinese and non-Chinese.
Zhao Xijun, deputy director of the Finance and Securities Institute at the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times that the revision is in accordance with the requirements of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to have broader coverage of data collection to meet the global standards along with the economic development.
As the transaction values of international receipts and payments have increased and become more diversified in recent years, it is necessary to collect data at a larger scale to help formulate economic policies, said Zhao.
“Irregular cross-border capital flows have become more frequent, so it’s necessary to improve the declaration mechanism so authorities can enhance the monitoring and warning capabilities,” Ding Zhijie, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics, told xinhuanet.com.
The regulation stipulates that those who fail to declare international receipts and payments will face a penalty from a warning to fines as much as 300,000 yuan ($49,530) for organizations and 50,000 yuan for individuals.
While the regulation stipulates that declaration information will be kept confidential and only used for statistics on international receipts and payments, the public are concerned about its impact on the anti-graft drive, as it is widely believed that corrupt officials transfer their assets overseas to avoid inspection.
However, the new policy does not reveal a timetable and detailed requirements for Chinese citizens to declare their overseas assets directly.
SAFE said in a statement Tuesday that it will not submit the statistics to anti-graft or anti-money laundering departments, and the data cannot be used as evidence for combating crime and corruption except for certain legal circumstances.
Other new laws and regulations that took effect on Wednesday include a nationwide requirement for courts to publish judgment documents online,  and lower tariffs on some 760 imported commodities by an average of 60 percent to aid economic restructuring and achieve balanced trade growth.