China Admits To Fake Data (Again) - Hidden Debt & Inflated Revenues

It"s not the first time (and it won"t be the last), but a recent nationwide audit found some local governments inflated revenue levels and raised debt illegally, once again crushing China"s credibility on the global stage when it comes to economic performance.

As Bloomberg reports, ten cities, counties or districts in the Yunnan, Hunan and Jilin provinces, as well as the southwestern city of Chongqing, inflated fiscal revenues by 1.55 billion yuan ($234 million), the National Audit Office said in a statement on its website dated Dec. 8.

The inspection, which covered the third quarter, also found that five cities or counties in the Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Hunan and Hainan provinces raised about 6.43 billion yuan in debts by violating rules, such as offering commitment letters.

 

The findings are a blow to China’s bid to rein in data fraud, which has been widespread in some of the poorer provinces where officials were incentivized to inflate the numbers as a way of advancing their careers.

 

Concern from investors wanting to be able to trust data out of the world’s second-largest economy led to the government trying to crack down on the practice, with President Xi Jinping saying in March that data fraud “must be throttled,” according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

While historically investors would rapidly shrug this news off and buy more stocks, with Chinese sovereign bond yields near their Maginot Line of 4.00%, losing credibility could be critical.

A new supervisory body was set up within China’s statistics office in April to bolster and ensure data authenticity and quality.

The country is also shifting to the latest United Nations-based statistical standard and using computers -- rather than local reports -- to calculate provincial gross domestic product, the chief economist said in September.

Chinese Province Admits It Fabricated Economic Data For Three Years

While it will hardly come as a surprise to China watchers who have for years mocked China"s cooked "data", overnight the state-run People"s Daily reported that the severely impacted by the commodity crunch of the past 2 years rust-belt province of Liaoning fabricated fiscal numbers from 2011 to 2014, raising fresh doubts about the accuracy of China’s economic data just two days ahead of the release of China"s GDP report.

The city of Shenyang in Liaoning province of China

City and county governments in the northwestern region committed fiscal data fraud in the period, Governor Chen Qiufa said at a meeting with provincial lawmakers Tuesday, Bloomberg adds. Not surprisingly, the fabricated economic data was meant to show a state of economic strenght with fiscal revenues inflated by at least 20%, and some other economic data were also false, the paper said, without specifying categories.

Why paint a rosier picture? The same reason as alwasy: Chen said the data were made up "because officials wanted to advance their careers." The fraud misled the central government’s judgment of Liaoning’s economic status, he said, citing a report from the National Audit Office in 2016.

The admission of fraud comes now because with growth now moderating, officials have "sought to improve the credibility of economic data" as diffusing financial risks becomes a key policy consideration, along with keeping growth ticking along at a rapid clip.

And while the outgoing Obama administration is cracking down on "fake news", Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, has said China is focusing on preventing "fake economic data" as well as increasing the quality of its statistics. Naturally, incidents such as this one will make China watchers that much more skeptical.

Fake economic data may be the least of Liaoning"s worries which in recent years has seen an unprecedented purge of more than 500 deputies from its legislature Bloomberg reports. The deputies were implicated in vote buying and bribery in the first provincial-level case of its kind in the Communist Party’s almost seven-decade rule, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Former provincial party chief Wang Min, who led Liaoning from 2009 until 2015, was earlier expelled following corruption allegations by China’s top anti-graft watchdog.

As China"s debt-fueled economic impulse continues, if only for a few more months, we wxpect more such instances of fake data to swim to the surface.