THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STATISTICS has said that enterprises in Liaoning and Shandong provinces, Ningxia Hui and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions, and Tianjin have forged their economic data to embellish their performance last year. Beijing News comments:

A spokesperson for the bureau said the mechanism to evaluate the economic performance of enterprises will be normalized, and unscrupulous businesses will be blacklisted. It is good that the bureau has accepted there are problems in its system, and it will take measures to solve them.

But the bureau must not ignore the fact that it is the local governments that prompt, if not encourage as the Ningxia case shows, the businesses to enhance their performance, because it helps boost the local economic growth and tax revenue－at least on paper. For instance, 20 fixed asset investment projects and 15 enterprises in Lingwu county of Ningxia had markedly enhanced their economic figures. The NBS spokesperson attributed their boldness to the protection they get from the local officials.

Besides, the related enterprises, too, benefit from the doctoring of data, as the local governments usually award well-performing companies with subsidies or tax cuts. Were it not for the NBS and auditing departments' hard work, the forged data would have been published and quoted as references for the higher authorities to make policy decisions.

The five cases are similar, as the fake data trail passes through county, city and provincial inspection departments, which means all the intermediary departments had given the green light to the forgery, or had not bothered to scrutinize the data.

It's time the central authorities resolved the issue, by extending the watchdogs' arm from enterprises to the local government departments responsible for authenticating the data they receive. The discipline and supervisory departments, too, must be made part of the investigation, because the NBS seems incapable of dealing with all the parties behind the scandal.