Important for local govts to stop cooking the books

To better coordinate government policies and predict and prevent risks, accurate information is indispensible. President Xi Jinping has stressed on many occasions that accurate statistics are the lifeline for the government's work and the truthfulness of data must be guaranteed.

That some of the lower-level governments in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region have cooked the books when reporting their budgetary incomes and industrial output, inflating the autonomous region's budgetary incomes by 53 billion yuan ($8.17 billion) and industrial output by 290 billion yuan, has led to the statistics department of the autonomous region trimming the region's GDP for 2016, according to a report by Xinhua News Agency.

It has also led to the region calling a halt to the building of some railway projects and other government-subsidized programs.