On The Legal Liability Of Accounting Information Distortion

Accounting information distortion is that the accounting information violates of the principle of authenticity, misuse the accounting rules in the forming process which leads to the situation where information does not match the actual economic situation. Nowadays, with the improvement of China’s socialist market economic system and various economic forms, all areas need more strict accounting information. Accounting information users’ basic demand of quality is its authenticity. However, accounting information distortion has become out of proportion these days. In China’s rapidly changing social and economic life, accounting information fraud seems to have been a common phenomenon which not only detriment the healthy development of China’s securities market, but also dampen investors’ confidence in the current economic environment. What’s worse, it will also result in more macro decision-making mistakes and affect governmental macro-control on the direction of our economy. This disaster is caused by multiple reasons which includes both internal factors and external factors in accounting field.From the perspective of development of relative accounting laws, the regulation of accounting information distortion starts from scratch and gradually become more complex and diverse. At the beginning accounting violations were regarded as a means of crime by other crimes, later it was enacted as separate charge. Gradually, the accounting law system has taken shape in China. In the current fiscal liability system, administrative responsibility is the dominate one which covers most extensions and includes most unlawful acts in practice. Criminal responsibility is the second one. The concrete accusation disclosed by criminal law information will make the accountant law-- "constitutes a crime, be held criminal responsibility" claim foundation. However, it is regrettable that with the advancing of economic industry, there is almost no regulation for fraudulent violations from the perspective of civil liability. This leads to violators easily making wrong choices in the face of huge illegal interests and modest costs. They indiscriminately forge or alter accounting information, fake economic matters, whitewash corporate performance in order to achieve their illegal purposes. In this regard, referring to relative foreign regulations we find that civil compensation is the most powerful deterrent for the punishment of such offenders. Voluminous and explicit civil liability system, high economic compensation measures make many western countries offenders shrink back in the face of illegal temptations. Certainly, such a mature accounting liability system also had a painful price, even with a few years of economic depression and financial turmoil.Therefore, this paper aims to explore on the basis of our previous development of accounting laws and the lessons learned abroad to make suggestions for improving legal liability system which relates to accounting information distortion. In order to effectively adjust the imbalance of relative legal liability in accounting information, we need to build accounting legal liability system which uses civil liability as leading factor,administrative responsibility and criminal liability as a supplement.