Disclosure dates back to 2007
Information of the three public consumptions was first disclosed by government departments as early as 2007. On January 1 of that year, the reform of government revenue and expenditure proposed by the Ministry of Finance was put into action in order to set up a modern budget administration.
The expenses were listed under a new category tagged "government expenditure in economic classification," which included many specific items such as salaries, welfare and subsidies. Among them, expenses for overseas trips, vehicle purchases/maintenance and receptions all belonged to Category 302.
Since 2007, the amount of money spent on these three items has been recorded in the classification books of government revenue and expenditure.
For a long time, the public believed that the reason for not disclosing such fiscal information was because there was no record of the three public consumptions in the government statistics, but this was not true.
According to Gao Qiao, director of the Budget Committee of the National People's Congress and former deputy finance minister, the reason they did not disclose the three public consumptions in the past was that the classification of such expenditure was unscientific and required further improvement.
A long way to go
The Ministry of Finance should have complete statistics of the government's revenue and expenditure, yet at this time it allows different departments to handle their own disclosure of fiscal information.
It may be a show put on by the ministry whose purpose seems obvious: to evade responsibility by playing a policy game.
Under traditional financial-budget management, the budget for government departments is divided into two categories: department budgets and project budgets. The two categories have different sources of funding. The department budget comes directly from government funding, which is used for paying the staff; the project budget comes from funds allocated by the National Development and Reform Commission at different levels, as well as project funds from local governments.
When the Ministry of Finance calculates the budgets of various government departments, it is not difficult work, because all the money must be distributed from its own account. However, when it calculates project budgets, the ministry is far from able to gather accurate statistics, because the funds are not under its own management. This is another deeper cause for the opacity of government expenditures.
In this regard, allowing different departments to disclose their own expenditures and budgets may be seen as a meaningful step towards achieving the goal of government financial transparency. Though there are still many problems regarding information disclosure, at least it kindles a light of hope for a public increasingly concerned with responsible government management.
