With investment in academic research increasing in China, research fund related corruption is also on the rise at universities due to system flaws and a lack of supervision.

Since 2006, the Haidian people's procuratorate in Beijing has investigated 16 cases involving academic research fund corruption, according to Li Siyao, a prosecutor from Beijing.

Two professors, surnamed Xie and Xu, at Peking University's (PKU) College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering were found guilty in February of using a 30,000-yuan research fund to travel to places including Tibet in the name of academic exploration, Guangming Daily reported.

Centering around the funds, a hidden chain of corruption has formed, involving professors, accountants and those responsible for buying research instrument.

Zhao Jing (pseudonym), an accountant at a prestigious Beijing university, was sentenced to four years in prison for embezzling more than 970,000 yuan ($153,253), most of it academic research funds, over nine years. Zhao attached her invoices onto those of other professors, and forged their signatures to receive reimbursements, China Youth Daily reported.

Beijing is not the only place where college campus corruption occurs. Li Haiying, a former vice president of the Wuhan University of Technology in Hubei Province, was sentenced to life in prison in 2008 for corruption, accepting bribes and embezzling more than 10 million yuan, the Changjiang Times reported.

"If no measures are taken, professors, who are in charge of large amounts of research funding, could possibly become a new group of corrupt individuals," a member of the procuratorate was quoted by the China Youth Daily as saying.

During their investigation, procurators in Haidian found that research funds are not used as the project regulations require. Much of the expenditure is irrelevant to the project and many people forge others' signatures and use phony invoices to withdraw funds, the report said. 

Phony invoices

Feng Yujun, a 40-year-old law professor at the Renmin University of China (RUC) in Beijing, is busy looking for more invoices as the year end approaches.

"The end of the year is a peak season for professors and researchers in China to be reimbursed for their scientific research projects. If you can't find invoices, your expenses from the project this year can't be reimbursed," Feng told the Global Times.

One standard for evaluating if professors have finished their projects and executed them well is whether or not they have spent all the money," he said.

Research funding is usually backed by government organizations, private companies and universities.

In 2010, the total research and development funding available in China was 706.2 billion yuan, up 21.7 percent from the previous year, according to a report released on the website of the Ministry of Science and Technology in late September.

Current college accounting systems and research projects detail what can be reimbursed and what cannot. On some projects however, it may be difficult to calculate the exact expense, for example on humanities and social science projects that don't require expensive instruments.

"Many of the expenses in these fields cannot be reimbursed, such as fees on treating others for work. As a result, the funds cannot all be used up by the time the research ends, as is expected," Feng said.

"Professors have to figure out how to spend all the money, and so some buy fake invoices," Wang Sixin, a law professor at the Communication University of China, told the Global Times yesterday.

In neighborhoods nearby the PKU and RUC campuses, located in Beijing's Haidian district, quite a few people make a living by selling fake invoices to professors.

System loopholes

Though policies on college information transparency were approved by the Ministry of Education in September 2010, none of the nation's top 112 universities actively publishes their fund resources, annual budget and usage, according to a report released by the China University of Political Science and Law early this month.

"Chinese universities may appear to have a set of standard financial regulation, but in the process of enforcement, proper supervision is hard to perform," Zhong Ming, a prosecutor from Haidian is quoted as saying.

Liu Kang, a professor at Duke University and Shanghai Jiaotong University, told the Global Times that university officials' involvement in academic research is also a potential reason for corruption.

Liu said the number of academic projects is considered a criterion for evaluating college leaders' overall performance, and more projects could possibly lead to a promotion, so college officials are less willing to strictly supervise fund usage.

"In some foreign countries like the US, research funding is included in a professor's annual salary, thus research fund related corruption is quite rare in those countries," Liu said.

Zhong Ming shared this view, saying that all the cases he and his colleagues investigated have had something in common. The commonality was that some relevant university departments believed that strict supervision of research funding did not help encourage professors to perform research, thus they were unwilling to supervise fund use carefully.

According to Feng, in order to stamp out fund corruption and abuse problems, universities in China should build an effective supervision system organized by professional teams to assess every phase of research projects.