China's National Audit Office, established in 1983, has examined more than 3 million institutions around the country and seized illegal and suspect funds worth 130 billion yuan (US$15.7 billion), Auditor-General Li Jinhua has announced.

Of the total, 466 cases involving 1.06 billion yuan (US$127.7 million ) in illegal and questionable funds were dealt with in the first six months this year, he told a seminar earlier this week.

Although great improvements have been made, China's auditing system still lags behind that of developed countries in content, method and information release.

"So far, the office has mainly focused on the legitimacy of the use of fiscal funds and we do not have a complete auditing system capable of uncovering deep fiscal problems," Li said.

"Our auditing still depends on outdated hand-checking and we do not have a regular release of auditing reports. All these things clearly hamper the development of our auditing work."

Li stressed that in the next five years the major tasks of the National Audit Office will be to discover serious fiscal irregularities and crimes, and to prevent corruption.

In order to achieve the goal, the office will pay more attention to the improvement of auditing content and method, he said.

"By 2007, the office will put half of its focus onto the validity of fiscal funds, aiming to uncover serious losses of State assets caused by ineffective management and mistaken decisions," Li said.

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