Can Fraudulent Cues Be Transmitted by Innocent Participants?

The authors explore whether and how linguistic indicators of fraud make their way into the Management Discussion & Analysis (MD&A) section of financial reports. Although research has shown that word choice and tone can help identify fraudulent financial reports, it is as yet unclear how this occurs when these reports are written by many individuals, some of whom are unaware that financial misrepresentation is occurring. Through an examination of industry recommendations and interviews with individuals experienced in writing the MD&A section, the authors confirm that many hands are involved in drafting this portion of financial reports. The authors then structure an experiment, using a real fraud case, that asks participants to write an MD&A from truthful prior U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and a memo from the CFO with suggestions of what to say in the current period MD&A. Unbeknownst to participants the CFO memo was created using phrases from financial statements subsequently identified to be fraudulent. The authors find that individuals do unwittingly write MD&A associated with fraudulent financial statements with relatively little suspicion and that linguistic cues contained in the CFO memo are transmitted to the ultimate MD&A through naive and innocent participants.     

财务舞弊中存在的内部控制问题--对世界通信公司财务舞弊案之剖析

世界通信公司曾作为美国第二大长途电话公司，创造了美国资本市场有史以来规模最大的财务舞弊事件。通过对“线路成本”的调整，利用会计造假虚构了近110亿美元的利润。从其破产的案例中可以看出，世界通信公司治理机制的不完善，内部控制受到了极大的忽视，这也是造成世界通信巨大的财务舞弊最主要的原因。之后提出的《塞班斯法案》，要求建立企业财务报告的可靠性，运用真实可靠的会计信息加强对公司的内部控制和风险管理。因此，本文将通过分析世界通信财务舞弊的原因，以及对于防范企业财务舞弊强化内部控制的重要性。     

试析《企业会计准则》中的公允价值

2007年1月1日开始执行的《企业会计准则》明确将公允价值作为会计计量属性之一,并不同程度地将公允价值运用于17个具体会计准则中,使按照新会计准则体系编制的财务表能够更加真实、公允地反映企业的价值。     

注册会计师的管理舞弊审计责任

注册会计师是否应该对管理舞弊承担相应的审计责任、应负何等程度的责任等问题一直是审计界争论的问题.河南华为事务所诉讼案使得这一问题在国内成为现实,注册会计师应该就其未尽勤勉尽责负责.就注册会计师的管理舞弊审计责任来说,"排除合理怀疑"是对"勤勉尽责"标准的另一种解说,通过对现有审计模式的改进,形成管理舞弊导向审计新模式可以更好地促使注册会计师履行其管理舞弊审计责任.     

Does self-regulation work? Experimental evidence of the reputational incentives of Self-Regulatory Organizations

Self-regulation (SR) is a common way of enforcing quality in markets (such as banking, financial services and several professions) and in a variety of public and private organizations. We provide experimental evidence of the reputational incentives of self-regulatory organizations (SROs) to publicly disclose versus cover-up fraud in an incomplete information environment. We find that observed behaviour is generally consistent with Bayesian equilibrium when subjects are informed about the relative likelihood of fraud detection by a ‘vigilant’ versus a ‘lax’ SRO type. In particular, a fraud disclosure equilibrium is supported when subjects are informed that the ‘vigilant’ SRO is more likely to detect fraud; otherwise, a cover-up equilibrium is supported. However, when subjects are not informed about the relative likelihood of fraud detection by the SRO types (as expected in real SR situations), no equilibrium is strongly supported. Our results suggest that in practice, the reputation-based incentives for effective SR may be inherently ambiguous and weak.     

Applying digital analysis to detect fraud: an empirical analysis of US marine industry

Firms have tendency to window dress their financial statements by reporting earnings to achieve reference points represented by N × 10 ^k . Such practice of reporting rounded earnings is likely due to (1) firms may believe that investors perceive a reported earnings of $1.99 million to be significantly less than $2.0 million; and/or (2) contracts between firms and stakeholders are likely to express earnings in round numbers. Auditors have employed more sophisticated digital analysis such as Benford's law, as part of their fraud detection processes. This study investigated the window dressing behaviour among firms in the US marine industry. The findings of the study suggest that window dressing is a significant practice among the marine firms. However, the extent of the pervasiveness of such behaviour is less severe among marine firms than among all publicly-listed firms in the entire US economy, suggesting that the quality of financial statements of marine companies is higher than the overall population of public companies.     

提高审计独立性的新思路：财务报表保险制度

审计师的独立性受损是导政审计失败的一个重要根源。财务报表保险制度对消除审计人员和上市公司管理层的利益关联,恢复注册会计师真实的独立地位,遏制上市公司造假具有不可替代的作用。我国目前实施财务报表保险制度具有可行性。     

Reading and understanding employee benefit plan financial statements

If your employee benefit plan has more than 100 participants, chances are you've had to work your way through the audited financial statements you're required to include with your Form 5500 filing. These statements contain a wealth of information about the financial health of your plan, and understanding them is an important fiduciary responsibility. To strengthen your grasp of financial statements, this article gives an overview that will make a plan's financial statements more informative, explains their basic structure and provides information on some of the more arcane aspects (such as actuarial tables). While this article focuses on Taft-Hartley (multiemployer) plans, much of it applies to other types of employee benefit plans.     

Financial constraints,short selling and corporate fraud: Evidence from China

This study investigates the relationship between financial constraints and corporate fraud commission and its detection and the moderating role of short selling using a partial observable bivariate probit model. First, financially constrained corporations are more likely to commit fraud and their fraudulent behaviours are less likely to be detected. Second, short selling has an interesting effect on corporate fraud. On the one hand, short selling has a direct restraining effect on corporate fraud commission and increases the likelihood of corporate fraud detection. On the other hand, short selling plays a moderating role in the relationship between financial constraints and corporate fraud. This study contributes to the corporate fraud literature by analysing the factors influencing corporate fraud and provides theoretical support for regulators and managers in monitoring fraudulent behaviour.     

Microfinance Control Fraud in Latin America

Over the past three decades, the global microfinance industry has witnessed phenomenal growth in terms of the numbers of borrowers and the total gross loan portfolio outstanding. An application of the criminologists' perspective and Black's theory of control fraud to the global microfinance industry reveals a high degree of overlap between the common characteristics of control frauds and the characteristics of the microfinance industry and suggests that the sector provides a criminogenic environment suitable to Ponzi-type dynamics, including an imperative of growth, misrepresentation of financial and operating performance, a reputation for integrity and innovativeness, concentration in unregulated markets and areas most conducive to accounting fraud, non-transparency and secrecy, dubious accounting methods, lobbying in favor of deregulation, attempts to suborn controls such as accountants, lawyers, regulators, and rating agencies, executive use of the company for personal gain, excessive risk taking at the expense of investors' capital, warnings raised but ignored, and, finally, inevitable collapse. Regulatory interventions are needed to prevent predatory lending and over-indebtedness of poor microfinance borrowers in Latin America and elsewhere. Such regulation, while necessary to protect the poor, is not well liked by the investment community as it places microfinance institutions under local scrutiny, reduces the profitability of the sector, and limits opportunities for control fraud.     

证券欺诈的理论与实证分析

本文用经济学分析及实证的方法研究了中国证券市场关于信息披露的欺诈行为。结论是：当监管加强，欺诈的预期成本增加，欺诈上市减少，反之，欺诈上市增加；当一股独大时，市场监督容易失效，便产生持续信息披露上的欺诈行为，此时，社会公众股东承担的总成本是无欺诈条伯下的代理成本与受欺诈导致的成本之和；监督失效时，削弱了诚实公司潜在的长期融资能力。实证结果表明，欺诈公司及其高层管理人员所受处罚量与其欺诈行为量的相关度很差，处罚的公平性值得商榷。     

Securities fraud

Recent frauds in investment banks and securities houses have revealed how vulnerable modern financial institutions are to criminal activity by their employees. In this paper, we examine how regulators may limit the incidence of securities fraud by encouraging firms to provide managers and dealers with appropriate incentives and by imposing ex post penalties once a fraud has been discovered     

财务分析在证券投资中的应用

在证券市场上,投资者通过对其所关注企业信息进行分析,对未来拟投资企业的前景和内在价值的判断发生变化,并通过投资者的交易,可能导致股价发生改变。证券投资分析的信息来源包括宏观信息、行业信息和企业信息,而会计信息是证券投资决策的基础。会计信息最终通过财务报表的形式来体现,在决策分析中,相关财务指标的分析起着至关重要的作用。     

Product market competition,incentives and fraudulent behavior

The present paper studies incentive provision in a model where a manager can affect the firm's stock price by exerting unobservable effort and through costly, deceptive signalling and investigates the role product market competition plays in shaping shareholders' trade-off between inducing effort and fraud.     

Detecting money laundering using filtering techniques: a multiple‐criteria index

Money laundering is a dynamic activity attempting to circumvent anti‐money laundering (AML) actions. We propose a money‐laundering detection approach encompassing three separate detection measures applied simultaneously, providing a consolidated index to minimize circumvention. The index incorporates three detection measures: (1) deviations in trading volume and frequency; (2) unusual payments to or receipts from an atypical trade partner; and (3) Benford’s Law, based on the number of times a specific digit occurs in a particular position in numbers to detect financial fraud. Finally, we design a numerical test that any reasonable detection approach should satisfy. Our results successfully discover possible fraud planted in the simulated data.     

Improved Mutual Fund Investment Choice Architecture

Two choice architecture interventions were explored to debias investors' irrational preference for mutual funds with high past returns rather than funds with low fees. A simple choice task was used involving a direct trade-off between maximizing past returns and minimizing fees. In the first intervention, warning investors that “Some people invest based on past performance, but funds with low fees have the highest future results” was more effective than 3 other disclosure statements, including the U.S. financial regulator's, “Past performance does not guarantee future results.” The second intervention involved converting mutual fund annual percentage fees into a 10-year dollar cost equivalent. This intervention also improved investors' fee sensitivity, and remained effective even as past returns increased. Financially literate participants were surprisingly more likely to irrationally maximize past returns in their investment choices.     

公司治理结构如何影响财务舞弊行为的实证研究

财务舞弊行为的产生有诸多原因,内部动因和外部诱因都有可能产生财务舞弊,就内部动因来说公司的治理结构显然起到了不容小觑的驱动作用,对于公司治理结构如何影响财务舞弊行为的研究是一个重要的课题。选取2009—2010年因财务舞弊而受到证监会、上交所和深交所行政处罚、通报批评和公开谴责的上市公司为样本,实证分析公司治理指标对财务舞弊的影响。分析结论是：加强对上市公司财务舞弊行为的监管和治理工作的重点应放在股权机构的合理化和提高董事会、监事会监督效率等方面。     

WHAT CAUSED FIXED INVESTMENT TO STAGNATE DURING THE 1990S IN JAPAN? EVIDENCE FROM PANEL DATA OF LISTED COMPANIES*

Taking into account considerable changes in the corporate finance behaviour of listed Japanese companies during the 1990s, this paper empirically investigates the causes of the stagnation of the listed companies’ fixed investment during the 1990s, using panel data from the companies’ financial statements. Our findings include the following: (i) while positive cash flow sensitivity was detected for the companies listed during the 1990s, it was not necessarily a consequence of the binding of liquidity constraints; (ii) declines in Tobin's q explain decreases in fixed investment throughout the 1990s; and (iii) the holding of liquid assets acted as a buffer against liquidity shocks.     

公司治理生态与财务欺诈

本文首先诠释了公司治理生态的涵义，然后论述了公司治理生态与财务欺诈行为的相关性，接着从公司治理生态的角度剖析了上市公司财务欺诈行为的成因，并提出了加强公司治理生态建设．治理财务欺诈行为的对策建议。     

Can investment advisors promote rational investment? Evidence from micro-data in China

Investment advisors are important participants in financial markets. With the increasing demand for household financial asset management in China, the role of investment advisors is being widely discussed. Taking investors’ degree of diversification as the proxy of the rational investment, this study examines the role of investment advisors in promoting rational investments. It finds that investors with investment advisors are more likely to invest rationally. Further analysis shows that investment advisors play a greater role in promoting rational investment of investors with more investment experience, better financial literacy, more investible assets and male. The conclusions of this study indicate that giving full play to the role of professional investment advisors in household asset allocations and encouraging investors to invest rationally is important for the prevention of financial risks and the promotion of the healthy development of the financial market.