National People's Congress (NPC) vice chairman Jiang Zhenghua, also director of the Statistics Law enforcement task group, said Tuesday a taskforce team found serious statistics fabrication scandals when they inspected Liaoning and Zhejiang provinces, Inner Mongolia and Chongqing municipality last November, official media reported Wednesday.

Economists usually doubt Chinese official indicators, which may be distorted during data collection for political needs or economic gains. China's economic growth rate is widely believed to exceed government's figures while unemployment is probably higher.

Beijing first introduced the Statistics Law in 1983 and made several amendments over the past two decades but has not yet strictly enforced the law.

``China's gross domestic product is the most controversial figure,'' Citigroup China economist Huang Yiping said.

Huang said major statistics problems occurred in local governments and local GDP figures were always higher than the GDP figures announced by the central government over the past years.

Jiang said lack of independent statistics work and flawed mechanisms were partly blamed for the fabrications. Local officials are promoted if they reported desired economic figures to the higher authorities, Jiang said, or are removed when they fail to fabricate the figures as expected. He saidthe fabrications have resulted in a confidence crisis in China's statistics. He pledged to expose major statistics scandals and punish those who were promoted by fabricating figures.

One scandal included a party boss of a town in Ningbo, who instructed statistics officials to inflate the town's annual industry output by 75 percent in 2003. In another case, senior officials of Chongqing inflated one company's 3 million yuan (HK$2.8 million) output value to 30 million yuan. pamela.pun@singtaonewscorp.com