Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has ordered the government to use revenue from some auto-related taxes for purposes other than road-related projects, infrastructure minister Kazuo Kitagawa said Tuesday.

Koizumi also said there should be no cuts in these taxes, which have been kept at levels up to 2.5 times their original rates, Kitagawa said at a news conference.

The use of revenue from six types of taxes has been limited to funding construction of roads and road-related facilities, and road maintenance.

The revenue has been funneled into special accounts to ensure it is used specifically for such projects.

But Kitagawa said the government will devise an outline of measures this year that reflect Koizumi's instructions.

The six taxes include the gasoline tax, automobile weight tax and diesel oil tax, whose rates have been provisionally hiked by legal revisions to levels 2.0 to 2.5 times their original rates.

Which of these taxes will be used to finance policy measures other than road-related projects will be decided after a review to be conducted in the coming weeks, Kitagawa said.

The gasoline tax and automobile weight tax generate revenue for national coffers.

Revenue from the diesel oil tax and automobile acquisition tax goes to local governments.

Subsidy cut sought

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe urged seven other Cabinet members Tuesday to reduce their ministries' annual subsidies to local governments by at least 630 billion yen under the administration's three-point local finance reform.

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry was instructed to cut subsidies other than welfare benefits by at least 500 billion, yen followed by 62 billion yen for the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry and 34 billion yen for the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Ministry.

Abe told a news conference he asked the seven ministers to submit their responses by Monday toward the formulation of a budget for fiscal 2006, which starts next April.

Under the decentralization initiative of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the government has been addressing the three-point reform to cut the central government's subsidies and tax grants for local governments and transfer tax sources from the state to the local level.

93.6 billion yen wasted

The Board of Audit said Tuesday that it has found 364 cases of wasteful government expenditures or inappropriate accounting treatment in fiscal 2004, totaling a record 93.6 billion yen.

The amount is the largest since the government started compiling comparable audit data in fiscal 1978, exceeding the previous record of about 51 billion yen reported in fiscal 1980, the board said in an annual audit of state finances submitted to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

Of the total, inappropriate evaluations of about 40 billion yen were made on university assets when all the national universities were transformed into national university corporations in April 2004.

The board also found inappropriate accounting totaling about 15.4 billion yen at the National Agency for the Advancement of Sports and Health, the organizer of the "toto" soccer lottery.