Watchdog urges family planning fines disclosure
Print Edition
China’s health and family planning watchdog has urged local departments to disclose information about family planning fines to the public.
“Health and family planning departments should fulfil every requirement in the management of ‘social compensation fees’ in accordance with laws and regulations, including information disclosure,” said Yao Hongwen, a spokesman for the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
Yao’s comments were aimed at recent claims that some officials had misappropriated family planning fines, or “social compensation fees,” for government profits or even personal use.
The fines are paid to local family planning departments by any family that violates China’s one-child policy and can amount to tens of thousands of yuan for each extra child.
Finance and family planning departments in just 17 of the 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland revealed the total amount of fines they received in 2012 when urged to do so by a lawyer, while the others claimed such data should not be made public or simply didn’t reply. None of the departments revealed how the money was spent.
Yao said local governments had the right to set down fine standards according to their regional realities and these fines must be fully transferred to local government budgets for financial management.
“These fines should be incorporated into the entire local fiscal input and spent on public services and social projects,” he said, adding that the money didn’t belong to family planning departments.
He said the costs of the family planning work were fully covered by local government budgets, and they should be in no way related to family planning fines.
In late August, the National Audit Office said at a meeting that it had failed to pay adequate attention to and hadn’t audited certain public funds, including the social compensation fee, due to limited auditing capacity and technology as well as the fact that such funds involved small amounts of money and were scattered across vast areas.
“The original intention of social compensation fees is to compensate inadequate public resources and control the population, but in some places it has become a channel for more births, and more births mean more funds for the government,” said Ma Guanghai, a social development professor with Shandong University.
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