Beijing Office of Changjiang Daily:

There is no trivial matter when it comes to people's livelihoods. I would like to ask, over the last few years, what measures have been taken by the National Audit Office to strengthen livelihood funding and audit projects to improve people's standard of life? What achievements have been made? Thank you.

Wang Lujin:

Thank you for your questions. Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the auditing sector has always upheld the people-oriented development concept, regarded achieving, safeguarding and improving the fundamental interests of the people as the starting point and objective in our work, and deemed safeguarding and making good use of livelihood funds as our most important commitment to the public. We have continuously advanced auditing efforts in major fields related to people's livelihoods, including health care, elderly care, employment, housing and agriculture, rural areas and farmers. We have insisted on reaching the grassroots level, conducting thorough supervision of funds and the implementation of policies, in a bid to ensure that all policies for benefiting the people rolled out by the CPC Central Committee can be fully implemented. We have seriously investigated and penalized cases of corruption and misconduct occurring among the people, better addressed the pressing difficulties and problems that are of the greatest concern to the people, met people's basic living needs, and increased people's senses of fulfillment, happiness and security. I will briefly introduce our achievements from two aspects.

First, I will introduce the auditing situation for poverty alleviation and rural revitalization. We have adhered to all the decisions and arrangements made by the CPC Central Committee, taken winning the battle against poverty as our top task, coordinated and arranged for best cadres from across the country to work on the front lines, and continuously strengthened auditing in the field of poverty alleviation. Over the past few years, we have randomly inspected a total of 1.02 trillion yuan worth of various kinds of poverty reduction funds. We have promoted the normalization process of poverty reduction fund management and constantly improved its in-use performance with the percentage taken up by invalid funds out of the total inspected funding reduced from 36.3% in 2013 to 1.5% in 2020, playing our part in winning complete victory in the fight against poverty. Since last year, in accordance with the arrangements and requirements made by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council, we have continued to do a good job in implementing relevant policies and fund auditing in order to better connect the work of consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation with the efforts on rural revitalization. We have continuously stepped-up auditing efforts in stabilizing supportive policies and consolidating progress of the "two assurances and three guarantees." During the five-year period of transition after completing all tasks of poverty alleviation in particular, we have conducted audits at every administrative level through the whole process of the use of funds that aim to consolidate poverty alleviation achievements. We have accelerated the construction of a long-term mechanism to protect the fruits of comprehensive poverty alleviation and to ensure that people do not slip back into poverty in large numbers.

Second, I will introduce the auditing situation for social insurance. In accordance with the multi-tiered social insurance system in China, we have organized auditing forces across the country to continuously audit pension funds, medical insurance funds, employment subsidies, public welfare lottery fund, government-subsidized housing projects and so on, in a bid to the safeguard the security of funds in all fields of social insurance and facilitate the implementation of major policies such as those aimed at promoting employment. During the auditing process, we have put greater emphasis on the security of funds, revealing and cracking down on illegal activity such as insurance fraud, hedging, embezzling or graft of all kinds within social insurance funds. We have also emphasized fund benefits, addressing all kinds of problems related to inefficiency such as idle funds, accrued liabilities and excessive security. In addition, we have paid attention to the consistency of policies, removed choke points, difficulties and breaking points throughout the implementation process of mechanisms and policies, and shored up weak links in social insurance, in a bid to let our people across the country benefit more and in a fairer way from reform and development outcomes. Thank you.