Trivial reports might land on big corruption

• Source: Global Times
• [04:41 September 17 2009]
• Comments

By Wu Huaiting

The government has moved to monitor officials' private lives to battle corruption, according to a report printed Wednesday in Outlook Weekly magazine. The removal of Beijing's former deputy mayor, Liu Zhihua, from office in June 2006 for his "corrupt personal life" is viewed as an example of the push, which has swept up other high profile officials. Liu was sentenced to death with a two year reprieve in January.

Unscrupulous private lives featuring mistresses, prostitutes and lavish spending have corrupted some Chinese officials and resulted in the abuse of public rights and funds. These officials view public funds as their own and spend the money to support their sumptuous lifestyles. It is not unusual to see these officials use public money to spoil their mistresses or pay generous tips to prostitutes. Some even shamelessly share their power with mistresses, allowing them to abuse the public rights for personal gain.

This behavior has stirred public anger and cost a loss of confidence in officials' personal integrity and the government's credibility.

For this reason, the government is intensifying its scrutiny of what officials are doing off the clock. Many measures have been proposed, including requiring officials to self-report on their assets. But none of these measures have worked. If an official dares to appropriate public resources for private use, how can we count on them to report themselves?

Mandatory publication of officials' use of public funds for food, travel and other items might be a more effective way to prevent abuse of public resources and create a window to legally supervise officials' private lives. Since these expenses have already been kept in the government's accounting books, making them public should be easier. Giving the public access will allow for easier detection of corruption, without compromising the privacy of officials too much.

It is naive to assume corrupt officials don't have ways to get around such reports. However, it would at least create some hurdles for the private abuse of public funds. No matter how careful a corrupt official was, they might leave some traces of misconduct in the numerous reports.

Others may also question whether it is worth the efforts to report such trivial expenses.

But in detecting corruption and abuses, nothing is trivial, as demonstrated in the case of Mona Ingeborg Sahlin, a Swedish politician and the current leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

In October 1995, Sahlin had to resign as Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden as well withdraw from candidacy to lead the Social Democratic Party, after the Expressen newspaper reported that she charged more than 50,000 Swedish Kronor ($7,231), which she had repaid, for private expenses on government credit card.

We cannot image officials in China would resign because of such a seemingly small fraud, but the case at least offers hope that by publishing officials' spending of public funds on food and other personal items, it would be possible to detect some problems.