China's Insurance Industry, Financial Reporting, Disclosure Issues

Financial accounting, as an economic information system, communicates information mainly through financial report, which should present fairly to the report users the information about the financial status, the results of the operations and the cash flows of the enterprises. Generally speaking, financial report should be aimed at 'decision usefulness', and provide relevant, reliable and comparable information. Insurance has such characteristics as risks' uncertainty, actual costs in the future, and continuous liabilities and so on, which determines the particularity of insurance financial accounting and insurance company financial report. According to the international conventions, insurance accounting standards can be divided into special GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles) and SAP (Statutory Accounting Principles). Special GAAP aims to present a true and fair view of operating results and financial position of insurance enterprises, while SAP intends to reveal the solvency of insurance enterprises, which determines that the insurance financial report is very different under these two types of insurance regulations. Further more, different information users have different requirements for the financial accounting information. Through a study on the information disclosure of international financial reports, the goal is to put forward some suggestions on the contents and the patterns of the information disclosure of China's insurance industry financial report.This thesis is broken into the following parts:As a beginning step, the first part examines the general requirements for the information disclosure of financial report. Traditionally, a financial report consists of financial statements, notes to the financial statements and other financial reports, of which financial statements are the main way of information disclosure. In general, the quality of the information provided in the financial report should meet the qualifications of understandability, relevance, reliability and comparability. With the development of modern science and technology, traditional patterns of information disclosure can not be seasoned with the coming information society, and need to be improved.The second part focuses on the especial requirements for the information disclosure of insurance industry financial report. Insurance industry has its unique features of operations, which determines insurance accounting standards, and sequentially the information disclosures are very different from those of general enterprises. On the one hand, insurance has such some characteristics as risks' uncertainty, actual costs in the future and continuous liabilities, etc, which results in its inexactness of information disclosure; on the other hand, insurance operation is based on the "law of large numbers" and the theory of probability, therefore, it is not easy to get the sorted information. According to the international conventions, insurance accounting standards can be divided into special GAAP and SAP. These two types of insurance standards are different in accounting principles and accounting treatment, etc., which determines that the insurance financial report is very different under these two types of insurance regulation.The third part tries to analyze the supply and demand for the information disclosure of insurance industry financial report. On the one hand, the demand determines the supply, but the extent of this determination is limited by many factors; on the other hand, the supply can counter-affect the demand. As the information suppliers, insurance enterprises hold entirely the insurance financial information. Naturally, they monopoly the information. In order to protect the information users and to standardize the financial information disclosure of insurance industry of our country, the requirements of different users should be seriously considered in the construction of the insurance accounting standards.The forth part investigates into the information disclosure of financial report of some insurance...