An Empirical Study Of Financial Executives Professional Quality And The Quality Of Accounting Information

As is known to all, the shareholders and stakeholders of listed companies are provided by the accounting information to understand the company’s financial position and operating results, and on the basis of these information, they recognize the company’s actual operating conditions and make corresponding decision. Financial executives, as one of the most key managerial positions in listed companies, control the enterprises’ financial information and cash resources, have significant influence to quality of accounting information, and undertake the compelling obligation. As a rational economic person, financial executives’ influence is reflected not only through professional knowledge, but also professional ethics. In addition, the financial executives’ execution can’t be ignored to accounting information generation in the process of accounting standards implementation. In consideration of the factor that pro-fessional ethics is difficult to be quantified, this paper won’t take it into consideration in the empirical practice. As to professional knowledge and execution, this paper will verify the correlation respectively between them and accounting information quality. In this paper, I choose financial executives age, tenure, CPA, education level, professional title as the substi-tution variables of financial executives’ professional knowledge. Moreover, considering the availability of data, whether the financial executives are directors, the number of their part-time jobs, salary, financial personnel quantity, staff qualifications are substitution variables of financial executives’ execution. As to accounting information quality, it is measured by a comprehensive score from the number of financial restatements, depreciation of fixed assets (depreciation period, residual value), bad debt provision,as well as the impairment of asset.This paper firstly summarizes literatures about the system of financial executives, the request of financial executives personal ability, the measurement of accounting information quality and the relationship between financial executives and accounting information quality; Secondly, based on upper echelon theory, knowledge-based economy, accounting professional judgment theory,it elaborates the role of financial executives’ professional capacity to the accounting information quality, and then gives the theoretical basis to this paper’s empirical research; Thirdly, through analysis on the related theory, it put forward three hypotheses need to be verified in this paper; Then, this paper takes100manufacturing enterprises which are listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange2012as samples, and makes empirical tests about the influence of financial executives work experience, education degree, the professional qualifi-cation on accounting information quality; Finally, on the basis of theoretical and empirical research, this paper makes suggestions on improving accounting information quality, and promote financial executives professional ability.Through the descriptive statistics of this paper, we find that financial executives’age span is large,the average age is on the high side, they change frequently on their positions, and85%of chief financial officers obtain bachelor or higher degree, most of them have interme-diate or senior title, but less than40%get the CPA. These show that most of chief financial officers have a certain degree and title in our country, and title exam gets more favor than CPA exam. In the executive aspect, financial executives who play pluralism accounted for57.14%, they have large gap in annual salary, the highest reached more than2million yuan, and the minimum is less than50thousand yuan; in general, the sample companies don’t have many financial staffs, on average, only accounted for2.1%of their employees;20.21%of employees have bachelor degree or above. In aspect of accounting information,20%of the sample companies occurred financial restatements for once or more times in2012,70%-80%of them are below standards in the aspects of asset depreciation period, residual value and bad debt provision, the quality of accounting information needs to be further improved.In addition, through the regression analysis and stability test between financial execu-tives’ professional quality and the accounting information quality, we also found that financial executives’ work experience, concurrently director and the number of accounting personnel have certain promotion effect to accounting information quality. However, education degree, CPA, professional title, number of parttime jobs, wages, and employee degree don’t, but the effect is not significant.According to the research conclusions in the end, this article puts forward suggestions such as specifying financial executives’qualifications, strengthening financial executives’ follow-up educational supervision, encouraging financial executives’autonomous learning. The article also puts forward the limitations of this article, expectation of later research.