This article only represents the author's own views.
A couple of new announcements involving internal investigations results for two U.S.-listed Chinese companies are showing why we need the agreement reached last month giving the U.S. securities regulator authority to directly investigate such firms. The group has basically been allowed to self-police itself in the more than two decades since Chinese companies began listing in the U.S., which is hardly reassuring coming from a country where inflating data is almost an ingrained part of the business culture.
The practice of inflating data certainly isn’t new, and seems to originate in China’s planned economic era where people were always trying to please their bosses by not only meeting, but often exceeding, their targets. Supervisors often claim ignorance in such situations and pin the blame on rogue underlings. But the reality is that people throughout such organizations are usually responsible, since bosses often pressure their underlings to achieve impossible targets and then pretend not to notice when they know the results they receive are probably exaggerated.