Under-fire charity admits flawed management

BEIJING - A spokeswoman for an under-fire Chinese children's charity, facing the latest in a series of public challenges over its finances, admitted on Monday that it had failed to update some financial figures on it website, which caused misunderstanding.

Jiang Ying, of the China Charities Aid Foundation for Children (CCAFC), told Xinhua that, due to a management flaw, financial reports on 13 programs under the CCAFC did not include figures of their expenditure and stirred doubts from the public.

The CCAFC will update these figures as soon as possible, Jiang said.

These charity programs have been under normal operation and have helped people by, for instance, providing free medical treatment for 33 children in Yan'an of northwest China's Shaanxi Province in 2011, she added.

Recently, the charity came across several accusations from the public of embezzling funds and laundering money.

Last month, the CCAFC was accused by a journalist named Zhou Xiaoyun of conducting money laundering activities involving about 4.8 billion yuan (762 million U.S. dollars) in 2011.

The group responded by saying that financial staffers had mistakenly listed 4.75 billion yuan in the foundation's cash flow statement when the amount should have been 475 million yuan.

In late December, the same accuser questioned the allocation of 19 million yuan raised by the CCAFC from a charity gala for a program called "Hope for Home" designed to fight human trafficking.

Zhou said the CCAFC only used about 1 million yuan out of the 19 million yuan, transferring the rest to a charity group set up by movie star Jackie Chan that supports poor children with serious illnesses, a move intended to inflate their expenditure records.

The CCAFC responded by saying that the transfer was in line with the donors' intention, which was for the money to reach both "Hope for Home" and the Jackie Chan charity's programs.

There is much work to do to improve transparency and the CCAFC will continue in that regard, according to Jiang.