The Hunan Bureau of the Ministry of Finance has rolled out systematic measures for internal control reviews, centered on an indicator system comprising 56 items across 8 categories. The system covers key areas such as internal control report filing, institutional framework building, business process execution, and risk prevention implementation, with detailed compliance criteria, on-site review points, and evidence checklists to standardize reviews.
The bureau has moved away from blanket reviews by deeply integrating internal control checks into routine supervisory tasks including budget execution monitoring, final accounts review, fiscal discipline inspections, and annual bank account verifications. Using leads from daily oversight, it identifies priority units and business lists for targeted reviews, enhancing precision.
Given the diversity of central units in Hunan in terms of sector, hierarchy, and risk, the bureau employs a combined online review and on-site spot check approach. Online, it conducts comprehensive reviews using the standardized indicator system, employing methods such as logic comparisons, compliance verifications, and document checks to identify omissions, weak evidence, and superficial self-assessments, thereby creating a problem baseline. Offline, it focuses on key areas and uses walk-through tests, personnel interviews, process retrospectives, and on-site verifications to uncover hidden issues like ineffective systems, lax enforcement, failed checks and balances, and missing risk controls, while maintaining problem ledgers for categorized handling.
For critical positions and process nodes in budget management, the bureau examines the scientificity and rationality of position setting, authority divisions, and workflows, as well as the implementation of segregation mechanisms for incompatible duties. It urges clarification of authority boundaries and standardization of approval procedures where needed.
For identified problems, the bureau has established a rectification mechanism with categorized handling and ledger-based control, setting deadlines and enforcing accountability to prevent cosmetic fixes. It also provides targeted guidance by offering standard templates, sharing typical cases, and conducting one-on-one consultations to help units address weaknesses. Moreover, it promotes long-term mechanisms for dynamic updating of internal controls, ongoing risk screening for positions, and continuous optimization of business processes, steering budget units from reactive correction to a full chain of preventive alerts, in-process control, and post-hoc improvement.
To build capacity, the bureau regularly conducts practical seminars and position-specific training to unify policy interpretation and judgment standards, while maintaining a review mechanism to dynamically update risk lists and review guidelines.