Legal account auditing in the corporate system of Chinese listed companies: relevance and implications

In recent years, the People's Republic of China has enjoyed strong growth that has attracted the attention of the whole world. In particular, the event that marked a significant development of the Chinese economy has been the entry into the WTO in 2001. This has triggered the opening of China to foreign investment and the gradual liberalization of foreign companies in the Chinese domestic market. The presence of foreign investors and foreign companies in China has increased the demand for higher quality in the standard of auditing and an acceleration of the process of international convergence. To this end, China over the years has continued its project of alignment with the international rules and in 2008 published the new CSA (Chinese Standards on Auditing) and in 2010 in accordance with the principle of global and continues convergence the CASB (China auditing Standards Board) has completed its review of the CSA achieving full convergence with the Clarified ISAs. The aim of this research is to investigate the current scenario of the system of statutory audit in the People's Republic of China, the degree of development of auditing system highlighting the differences and peculiarities of the audit through an empirical analysis that involved the companies composing the index CSI 300 the 300 most highly capitalized companies, 95 of which are listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and 205 on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The analysis showed that there is a strong presence of local auditing firms, almost half of the companies listed on the CSI 300 are audited by domestic firms. With regard to the presence of foreign companies, it was found that foreign companies not belonging to the big four are the most representative. In fact only 76 companies are audited by the Big Four.