Pushing for end to deadlock over China's audit secrets

The US Chamber of Commerce has urged Washington and Beijing to resolve a dispute over the auditing of US-listed Chinese firms, warning failure to do so will seriously hurt both countries.

"The American business community has become increasingly alarmed at the stand-off between American and Chinese regulators to resolve the impasse over the sharing of audit papers," the chamber warned. "Failure to resolve this issue could result in significant economic harm to China and the US, damaging the bilateral relationship,"

The controversy involves actions by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) against Chinese accounting firms, in connection with SEC fraud investigations of Chinese firms listed in the US, which are audited by these Chinese accounting firms.

The SEC has filed a suit in the US District Court in Washington to compel the Chinese subsidiary of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu to produce audit papers on Longtop Financial Technologies, a Chinese company delisted from the New York Stock Exchange over fraud allegations.

The SEC also filed administrative proceedings in December against the Chinese subsidiaries of the Big Four global accounting firms (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young Hua Ming, KPMG Huazhen, and PricewaterhouseCoopers Zhong Tian) plus Chinese audit firm BDO China Dahua. The firms were charged with administrative violations for refusing to provide audit papers to the SEC, which is seeking to ban these subsidiaries from practising in the US.

The chamber, the world's biggest business federation representing more than three million US businesses, said it met leaders in both countries as well as senior officials at the SEC, the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the US Treasury Department, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the People's Bank of China, to push for a solution.

In December, two senior chamber vice-presidents, Myron Brilliant and David Hirschmann, sent a letter to then SEC chairman Mary Schapiro and then CSRC chairman Guo Shuqing, with copies to then treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and Vice-Premier Wang Qishan, urging a bilateral deal on this matter.