Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has said all ministries, agencies and localities must consider corruption prevention and detection their central, regular and uninterrupted task.

PM Dung, who is also Head of the Central Steering Committee for Anti-Corruption, made the emphasis while chairing the committee’s 17 th session in Hanoi on April 25.

“Together with the strict, open and transparent settlement of corruption-related cases, all ministries and localities should focus on corruption detection and prevention, especially inspection and supervision work,” he said.

He also stressed the need to effectively implement anti-corruption measures through the building and completion of institutions, as well as raising the responsibilities of leaders, the role of Party cells and each Party member in preventing and combating corruption.

It is necessary to seriously implement regulations on openness and transparency in the operations of agencies and organisations while strengthening supervision mechanisms of people and socio-political organisations for the fight against corruption, waste and negative cases, he added.

The PM also noted that authorised agencies should continue popularisation and education on the corruption fight as well as speed up the settlement of corruption cases, especially serious and complex cases.

A draft report on corruption prevention results in the first quarter and an orientation and tasks for the second quarter of 2012 delivered at the session showed that the fight against corruption in Vietnam has seen positive developments, with openness and transparency in the operation of agencies and organisations, the assets and incomes of civil servants, as well as the creation of codes of conduct and professional ethics.

The Government Inspectorate reviewed five years of implementing the Anti-Corruption Law and the first stage of the National Strategy on Anti-Corruption.

In the first quarter of this year, inspections detected wrong spendings with a total sum of over 32 trillion VND.

In the period, cities and provinces nationwide concluded 310 inspections in economic and social fields.

The country took proceedings in 55 cases and prosecuted 67 cases relating to corruption, representing year-on-year respective increases of 12 percent and 34 percent.

In the second quarter of this year, the Central Steering Committee for Anti-Corruption will speed up the implementation of Project 137 on putting corruption prevention on training programmes as well as urgently issue documents guiding the use of the anti-corruption reward fund, in order to timely commend and reward people with outstanding achievements in detecting and denouncing corruption cases.

The committee will focus on steering the discovery, inspection, prosecution and judgement of corruption cases, especially serious and complex cases.-VNA