Guizhou province in southwestern China is closing its “integrity and discipline account,” long abused by officials as a tool to hide corruption, local newspaper Guizhou Metropolis Daily reported on Friday.
The account was intended for party and government officials to deposit money they had received as gifts or bribes but were unable to return, or felt would be impolite to refuse. Officials could go to any bank, and the name of the depositor and the amount of money were kept confidential.
The newspaper report says that the provincial supervision department will shut down the account in the next few days and make one final transfer of funds to the provincial treasury. Party members and government officials from now on must reject outright all gifts that might affect their impartiality, it said.
Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Centre of Anti-Corruption Studies at Peking University, told Sixth Tone that the effect of such accounts is not ideal in practice, and that corrupt cadres have taken advantage of the system’s loopholes. “Some government officials only hand in a portion of the money they receive,” Zhuang said, adding that others would hold off depositing bribes and other illegal gains until “right before an anti-corruption inspection.”
The latest revision of the Chinese Communist Party Disciplinary Regulations issued last October stipulate that receiving and sending gifts and money are illegal. Therefore, according to Zhuang, integrity and discipline accounts are in conflict with current party rules, as they mean the official has to first accept a gift before handing it in.
In late 2012 President Xi Jinping kicked off a campaign against corruption and extravagant spending. By December 2015, a total of nearly 140,000 officials had been punished for violating party discipline, and 4,790 cases of officials illegally accepting gifts and money were reported.
Integrity and discipline accounts first appeared in the late 1990s in eastern China’s Jiangxi province as anti-corruption devices. In 1999 in the provincial capital of Nanchang, a total of 5.5 million yuan ($827,000) was deposited into one of these accounts within the first four months.
In 2000, Ningbo, a coastal city in Zhejiang province, eastern China, opened an account that could accept foreign currencies and securities. It received 4.22 million yuan in the first five months. After these initial successes, many localities in other provinces joined in, with the measure being seen as an innovation.
According to media reports, 13 Chinese provinces at one point had such accounts. Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong province, sees an average of about 10,000 yuan deposited daily. In Shanxi province, northern China, more than 20,000 officials have used the accounts to return bribes, in total handing over more than 170 million yuan as of April.
But several provinces have since decided to abandon the practice. Most recently, Sichuan province, in southwestern China, closed its integrity and discipline account on July 15. The party’s provincial commission for discipline inspection at the time said the reason was “to plug the leaks which some corrupt party members exploit to avoid discipline investigation and legal punishment.”
Additional reporting by Dong Heng.
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