Report shows stress on confidentiality to preserve investigations' integrity
China's top discipline watchdog on Wednesday revealed detailed information on the operations of the Party's discipline inspection offices, which analysts said highlight the great importance attached to confidentiality in discipline inspection.
In order to help inspection teams discover problems within a brief time frame, a provincial government inspection office will first perform preparatory work, collecting tips from the public and other clues that will later be distributed to 10 inspection teams according to their assignments, said a report published on the official website of the Communist Party of China's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on Wednesday.
Taking the inspection team dispatched by the provincial Party committee of Central China's Hunan Province as an example, the report explained that the team normally spends a month on an inspection tour to an institution directly under the provincial or county government and two months inspecting a prefecture-level city.
According to the CCDI's online report, the inspection office provides each inspection team member with a laptop specially manufactured to ensure confidentiality and marked with a sticker reminding the inspector to keep secrets.
During an inspection tour, all the laptops of an inspection team will be collected and kept in a specially designed safe when not in use.
The notebooks in which inspectors take down interview notes are also specially designed and are sealed and kept in a safe once an inspection tour is completed. Inspectors normally are not allowed to tear out any of the notebooks' pages, which are numbered, the report said.
"Confidentiality is important in the inspection process. The discipline inspection department has higher confidentiality requirements than other departments," Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Anti-Corruption Research Center at Peking University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
"Inspectors' work plan and the minutes of interviews conducted by inspectors must be strictly kept secret in order to protect the interviewees, especially people who give tip-offs," he explained.
Due to confidentiality requirements, the inspectors are required to conduct all their activities, including eating, conducting interviews and receiving visitors, only in the place in which they are stationed, the report added.
The inspection team is banned from accepting any accommodation offered by the institution under inspection so as to prevent corruption, Zhuang noted.
