Beijing Times once reported on the problem of a large number of financial intermediary companies helping central enterprises to make false accounts under the title "13 Central Enterprises Fraudulent Financial Audit Reports": After the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission made a surprise inspection of the financial audit reports of 181 central enterprises It was found that the conclusions of the financial audit reports of 13 companies were contrary to the facts; 120 financial audit reports were insufficient; 80 companies lost more than 10% of their total assets; and financial intermediaries made false accounts after collecting money.
In fact, corporate "false accounts" have repeatedly appeared in corporate financial statements for a long time, and have become a chronic disease of economic management, especially macroeconomic management. This is definitely worth pondering.
One of the motivations for pursuing this is the pressure from higher-level authorities to set economic growth targets. This is often due to the inertia of China's original planned economic system and the shortcomings of the official performance appraisal system, because "officials give out numbers, and figures go out to officials" is no longer news, and keeping false accounts and off-the-books accounts have long been made public. Secretly, when government departments need to highlight their political achievements in summarizing their work, they need to blow up the digital balloons as loudly as possible. The second motive is driven by the interests of the enterprise itself. For example, when an enterprise borrows money from a bank, it must exaggerate the figures of its assets, net assets and profits, and cover up non-performing assets; when it declares taxes to the tax department, it must conceal and reduce the amount of profits in order to "reasonably avoid taxes." ; When reporting business performance to the competent authorities, it is necessary to "add material" to the actual figures. Of course, the main issue is the personal opportunity cost, which is the reason why the personal profit opportunities are far greater than the cost of making false accounts.
For intermediaries such as law firms, asset appraisal companies, and accounting firms, it is also for their own interests to "accept money from others and eliminate disasters for others." Moreover, it is the central enterprises that pay, not the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which of course is only "responsible" to the central enterprises that paid. In addition, among the 181 central enterprises, only 92 have set up the post of chief accountant, which cannot effectively carry out internal financial supervision of the enterprise. Even if a chief accountant is established, he is appointed internally by the central enterprise and is responsible to the person in charge of the enterprise and subject to the enterprise's supervision. The leadership of the person in charge is just insiders supervising insiders, which is inherently flawed in the system.
Regarding the issue of false accounting, former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji once required all accountants to be "integrity-based, ethical, adhere to standards, and not make false accounts". He made an exception three times for China's new The three national accounting colleges established have the same school motto of “no false accounting”. This was originally the "bottom line" of professional ethics in the accounting industry, and the newly revised Accounting Law of the People's Republic of China and the State Council, which was implemented on July 1, 2000, also clearly stipulates the accounting responsibilities of the heads of relevant units. Article 4 stipulates: The person in charge of the unit shall be responsible for the accounting work of the unit and the authenticity and completeness of the accounting materials. Article 21 stipulates: Financial statements shall be signed and sealed by the person in charge of the unit, the person in charge of accounting work, and the person in charge of the accounting agency (accounting supervisor); for units with a chief accountant, the chief accountant must also be signed and sealed. The person in charge of the unit shall ensure that the financial accounting information is true and complete. Article 28 also clearly states: The person in charge of the unit shall not instruct, instruct, or force accounting institutions or accounting personnel to handle accounting matters in violation of laws. Failure to comply with the above provisions will result in administrative sanctions or even criminal liability depending on the severity of the case.
But in actual implementation, how many people will be held accountable? Listed companies have caused investors to lose tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions or tens of billions due to false accounting, but what proportion can really be found out? The punishments (a considerable number of which are not even punishments) for those found to have violated the rules appear relatively too light.
For example, Article 43 of the "Accounting Law": Anyone who forges or alters accounting vouchers and accounting books, or prepares false financial accounting reports, which constitutes a crime, shall be held criminally responsible in accordance with the law. If there is an act in the preceding paragraph that does not constitute a crime, the financial department of the people's government at or above the county level shall notify the unit and may impose a fine of not less than 5,000 yuan but not more than 100,000 yuan on the unit; the person in charge and other directly responsible persons who are directly responsible for it shall be notified. , a fine of not less than 3,000 yuan but not more than 50,000 yuan may be imposed.
In addition, Article 177 of the Securities Law stipulates: The issuer of securities approved for listing and trading fails to disclose information in accordance with relevant regulations, or the disclosed information contains false records or misleading statements Or if there are major omissions, the securities regulatory authority shall order corrections and impose a fine of not less than 300,000 yuan but not more than 600,000 yuan on the issuer. The directly responsible person in charge and other directly responsible personnel shall be given a warning and shall be fined not less than RMB 30,000 but not more than RMB 300,000. If a crime is constituted, criminal liability shall be pursued in accordance with the law.
However, due to the lack of civil liability provisions in my country's securities laws, administrative penalties are generally imposed on listed companies for information disclosure violations, but no compensation is provided to injured investors. In terms of criminal liability and administrative liability, supervision is also insufficient. So far, listed companies that have violated relevant regulations and defrauded their listings, and even continued to deceive shareholders after listing, have been exposed many times, but they have not been dealt with strictly in accordance with the above regulations. Compared with the fact that listed companies can recover huge amounts of money from the market by making false accounts, and the profits of departments, enterprises and individuals are so high, the costs are so low that there is no need to use the word "taking risks" to describe it.
And the phenomenon of falsifying accounts does not only occur in central enterprises. In the past year or two, local accounting firms, asset appraisal agencies and accounting practitioners from relevant departments have organized activities to swear "not to falsify accounts". This illustrates the prevalence of false accounting, which can be said to be a common phenomenon. For example, joint ventures and private enterprises conceal and shrink profits, and listed companies falsely report to expand profits. It's just that listed companies are more directly involved in the personal interests of many shareholders and have the greatest repercussions. From the disclosed cases of Qiong Minyuan, Hongguang, Zheng Baiwen, Yinguangxia, Daqing Lianyi and McCote, various intermediaries for the listing of the entire company include listed companies, securities companies, law firms, accounting firms and asset appraisal companies. There are scenes of fraud secretly taking place at every step of the process. What ultimately suffers is the loss of the integrity of the vast number of investors, Chinese listed companies and securities intermediaries.
The principle that the securities market should be an open, fair and just market requires securities market intermediaries to maintain it. Intermediaries play the role of "police", and, most importantly, the intermediaries' Services are not simply for enterprises, but also for the public. Making false accounts for a listed company means that the listed company only accepts your services and products, but provides "fake and shoddy" products to the public, seriously affecting the interests of the public.
As a securities intermediary, it is not only an intermediary between the issuing company and investors, but also an intermediary between the issuing company and regulatory agencies. It has a more direct and timely role in the information disclosure of listed companies and the supervision of listed companies before and after listing. , the direct effect of supervision cannot be replaced by regulatory agencies. Because the tasks undertaken by relevant securities intermediaries for listed companies include: issuing audit reports, asset evaluation and capital verification reports for the company's securities issuance and listing, issuing audit reports for listed companies' interim or annual reports, and issuing accounting accounts and accounting statements for listed companies, etc. Carry out annual accounting verification and audit work. It can be said that securities intermediaries, especially accounting firms, have the best understanding of the operating conditions of listed companies.
However, we have always only focused on the supervision of listed companies and neglected the supervision of securities intermediaries, and the penalties for their violations and violations have not been strong enough. For example, the "CPA Law of the People's Republic of China" came into effect on January 1, 1994. The legal liability for violations of this law is: "The financial department of the people's government at or above the provincial level shall give a warning, confiscate the illegal gains, and may also impose illegal penalties. A fine of more than one time but not more than five times the income; if the circumstances are serious, the financial department of the people's government at or above the provincial level may suspend its business operations or cancel it." "Anyone who intentionally issues false audit reports or capital verification reports, constituting a crime, will be held criminally responsible in accordance with the law." However, most of the cases revealed have avoided criminal liability on the grounds of "technical errors or mistakes." It is also due to the neglect of supervision of intermediaries and the insufficient punishment of their violations. In addition, the profit opportunities obtained from their violations are far greater than the costs of violations.
In fact, human economic behavior is naturally reasonable, which is consistent with the selfish "economic man" hypothesis in economics. From the perspective of economics, economics is "amoral" and "selfish", and everyone's behavior is to choose the behavior plan that is most beneficial to themselves under given conditions, that is, they will adopt opportunity costs. to calculate your own behavior. If it is profitable to make false accounts, everyone will have the motivation to make false accounts. The key depends on the cost of making false accounts. Therefore, there are no unreasonable personal behaviors and personal choices, only unreasonable institutional designs and arrangements. As Lang Xianping said: When we criticize those unreasonable or even illegal personal behaviors, have we considered the design and arrangement of our system?
Some of my friends who are in the sales agency business and are agents for steel and automobile sales are very comfortable in exploiting loopholes in the system. For example, the supplying factory clearly stipulates that the sales price should be unified, and each agent cannot lower the price privately. However, it also stipulates how many products (amount) the agent sells each year, and what proportion of sales expenses the factory can give as rebate. In three months, when the sales volume is close, they will definitely use other methods to reduce prices privately to complete the specified sales volume. The purpose is to get the sales rebate given by the factory, because the total profit from the sales rebate is greater than the loss from the price reduction. As a result, the system of unified sales prices loses its binding force.
The tricks played by auto parts, the disaster of administrative intrusion on science, and the beauty blog finals to reduce mobile phone tariffs in Beijing
China's continuous rapid economic growth and the continuous decline of the stock market have formed a huge contrast. According to statistics, the average dividend of China's stock market from 1998 to 2003 was far lower than the bank deposit interest rate during the same period. In the three years from June 2001 to September 2004, the market value of the stock market shrank by 710 billion yuan. If we add In terms of other costs and expenses, investors' net losses were approximately 1.01 trillion yuan. And this huge loss can no longer be explained simply by false accounting.
Possibly the biggest news in the Chinese securities market in November 2004 was the Wang Xiaoshi case, which pointed out the systemic shortcomings, which means that the existing system provides various rent-seeking opportunities.
The huge losses suffered by investors over the years have actually basically flowed into listed companies, intermediaries, government taxation and management agencies that have entered the market through government regulation. The losses are those small and medium-sized investors who can freely enter the market. Listed companies, intermediaries and securities regulatory authorities have essentially become vested interest groups. Therefore, while excessive use of administrative functions to intervene in the market and replace market functions, they are unable to provide effective market systems and rules, and cannot punish those who plunder investor wealth. Severe punishment will be imposed on the behavior (Yi Xianrong's point of view).
Everyone knows the harm of making false accounts. If it is not stopped, there will be a phenomenon of "bad money drives out good money". If you don't make false accounts but others are, then Losing one's competitiveness, in the end, one has no choice but to "complicitly". If this continues, the country's normal economic order will be disrupted, and the government's macroeconomic decisions will be affected by distortion of the economic information it possesses, which will seriously endanger social morality and cause a crisis of social trust. However, "three feet of ice does not freeze in a day." To prevent the spread of false accounting, we must take into account political, business, social, cultural and other factors, and must reform and improve the system and system construction.