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Exclusive | China’s regulator, rebutting claim of Chinese accounting fraud on US markets, says its goodwill to collaborate had been snubbed

  • The audit papers of 14 US-listed Chinese companies had been submitted to US regulators since 2012, China Securities Regulatory Commission said
  • China has sought to build a mutually acceptable mechanism or inspection since 2019, CSRC said

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Why you can trust SCMP
Guo Shuqing (right), then chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), greeting a delegation led by Mary Schapiro (left), then Chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 2, 2012. Photo: Handout

China’s securities regulator says it has presented proposals to collaborate with the US accounting oversight board since 2019 to reconcile local auditing rules with global bookkeeping standards, rebutting criticisms that the country was allowing Chinese companies to “cheat” on US capital markets.

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The audit papers of 14 US-listed Chinese companies – three last year alone – have been submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) in recent years, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) said.

“China has proactively sought to build a mutually acceptable mechanism for inspection” since 2019, with the most recent proposal being on April 3, the regulator said in response to an inquiry by South China Morning Post, declining to identify any of the companies. “We can say that the collaboration has been effective.”

Still, the previously unreported outreach by the CSRC, made a day after Luckin Coffee disclosed the biggest accounting fraud by a Chinese company on Wall Street with its 2.2 billion yuan (US$309 million) sales fabrication, was too late to stave off retribution by the US Congress to punish Chinese companies for what Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy called “cheating” in America’s capital markets.
Kennedy sponsored a bill on May 21 to boost oversight and expel fraudulent Chinese companies from Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.

The Senate bill is the latest dust-up in US-China relations, which have deteriorated to a new low during the past two years over a growing litany of disputes from the origin of the coronavirus to human rights, to 5G technology and the proposed Chinese national security law for Hong Kong.

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