A national audit campaign found 30.8 billion yuan (3.85 billion U.S. dollars) in misused social security funds last year, Wednesday's China Audit Post quoted a senior auditor as saying.

Last year the government carried out a national campaign to audit social security funds worth more than 800 billion yuan, said Yu Xiaoming, deputy auditor general with the National Audit Office (NAO).

The national campaign looked at the financial management of social security funds in every jurisdiction excluding Shanghai and Tibet.

Yu was quoted as saying the NAO had meted out severe punishment to officials caught misusing funds during the audit campaign. The NAO-run newspaper didn't say which officials were punished or how.

In an audit last July of Shanghai's social security fund -- which was separate from the national audit campaign -- the NAO found that 3.7 billion yuan had been misused, creating the city's biggest scandal since economic reforms began.

Chen Liangyu, former secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of Communist Party of China (CPC), was sacked last September for alleged involvement in the scandal and is now under investigation.

Nine other Shanghai officials and the former head of the National Bureau of Statistics Qiu Xiaohua were stripped of their posts and expelled from the CPC for their involvement in the scandal.

Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng said in January this year that the city had retrieved all the misused money involved in illicit loans and investment.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Security has vowed to strengthen management of the country's pension funds and make regular public reports on the collection and use of the money.

China is expected to collect about 805 billion yuan in pension contributions and premiums from medical, unemployment, work injury and maternity insurance programs this year.

Source: Xinhua