CSRC to tell brokerages to tighten reviews

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) will ask underwriters and auditors to review the financial data of 882 companies that are queuing up for their IPOs, the regulator said in a statement on its website Wednesday.

A total of 300 staff members at government departments, securities brokerage companies and accounting firms attended the 2012 IPO Financial Report Work Meeting late Tuesday, and discussed regulations and probes into the capital market, the statement said.

All the securities brokerages and accounting firms who offer underwriting services need to double-check the accuracy of the finanical statements submitted by the companies they underwrite, and those who cannot finish the examination by March 31 should voluntarily halt the IPO application, the CSRC said.

Yao Gang, vice chairman of the CSRC, said the regulator will organize for 15 teams to randomly verify at most 50 applications, the 21st Century Business Herald reported Wednesday, citing sources who attended the work meeting.

"I think only around 20 to 25 percent of the 882 companies will get approval from the CSRC, and some may postpone or shelve their plans for an IPO due to the regulator's stricter review process," Li Weidong, research director at ChinaVenture Investment Consulting, told the Global Times.

The CSRC has slowed down approvals of new IPOs since the second half of 2012 in a bid to stabilize the sluggish stock market, because analysts said an oversupply of new stocks was one of the factors behind the market's poor performance.

"With the IPO review process slowing down, it is a good opportunity for the regulator to start a deep reform to resolve some key problems, like firms dressing up their business performance by disclosing false profit data," Tu Chunhui, general manager of the research department at China Development Bank Securities, told the Global Times.

The CSRC will conduct regular investigations into the accuracy of companies' financial reports, a move that used to be taken by the regulator only when companies were found to have some serious financial issues, according to the statement.

"Faking of balance sheets by companies is unacceptable, and is much worse than a decline in their business profits," an insider at an investment bank who attended the meeting was quoted as saying by the 21st Century Business Herald.

Weighed down by the slowing economy, 30 companies that got listed on mainland stock exchanges in the first half of 2012 saw a decline in profits, with 6 percent of them seeing a profit slump of more than 50 percent year-on-year, according to the CSRC.

Some 49 percent of China's 1,689 listed non-financial companies are suspected of having offered inaccurate data in their financial reports in 2012, with the largest proportion in the real estate industry, according to an assessment of financial reports e-mailed to the Global Times on January 6 by the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, a consultancy under the Ministry of Commerce.