Quality new focus of financial auditing

Future national audits will focus more on "performance auditing" rather than scrutinizing the law and trying to expose rule violations, a top official said.

In an online interview yesterday on the website gov.cn, Li Jinhua, auditor-general of the National Audit Office (NAO), the country's public finance monitor, said that besides focusing on how and where the often huge government budget is spent, the job of the NAO should gradually be shifted towards how "well" the money is spent.

Li, who is widely hailed by the media as "iron face" for the pragmatic but down-to-earth NAO reports that usually expose the problems of the other parallel departments of the State Council, said he would give himself a mark of 70 for his job performance.