Chinese charity groups face hardships in transparency
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Chinese charity groups have been experiencing many difficulties in releasing donation information -- though they would like to do it, a recent survey has found.
Some 96 percent of 99 charity groups surveyed randomly thought information transparency is "very important" or "relatively important," according to a 2010 report on information transparency among Chinese charities that was released Thursday.
Some 90 percent of the public was not satisfied with the current levels of information being released.
"Many reasons led to the current situation, and one of them is that many charity groups don't have the personnel and money to realize information transparency," said Liu Youping, vice director of the China Charity & Donation Information Center, which released the report.
"Releasing information to the public itself means financial costs, and it requires charity groups to have the capacity to process information in the first place," Liu added.
Taking financial information, for example, Liu said charity organizations need personnel to write financial reports every year, and they also had to spend money when authorizing auditing institutions to review these reports.
Liu also noted that the current policies only stressed the importance of information release, but hardly provided resource supports for charity groups to do that.
While urging the quick passage of legislation to promote information releases, the report called for training programs to boost the charity groups' capacity to first deal with information.
In addition, the report also advised establishing an evaluation and rewarding system for these organization's performances in releasing information.
