The city's prosecutor's office plans to start keeping records of companies that commit bribery to prevent them from doing business with government departments, the Shanghai People's Prosecutors Office said Thursday.

The prosecutor's office ordered local government departments in March 2012 to begin checking the bribery records of their commercial partners before procuring goods or putting construction projects up for bid, according to a press release from the prosecutor's office.

The office plans to apply the bribery record inquiry system to the government's procurement process for medical and firefighting equipment first before expanding it to other parts of the government.

The city's government needs to take measures to investigate cases while preventing crime, said Chen Xu, the chief prosecutor of the Shanghai People's Prosecutors Office, according to a report in the Jiefang Daily.

The office prosecuted 1,941 people in 1,658 bribery and corruption cases from 2008 to 2012, 93.9 percent of which were major cases involving construction and agriculture projects.