China needs to work honestly and quickly with foreign regulators to restore market confidence in its companies listed in North America, a senior US Treasury official said on Saturday. Chinese officials have put off meetings with their US counterparts to address a row over the auditing of Chinese firms listed in the United States and Canada.
"We encourage our Chinese counterparts to work expeditiously to restore investor confidence, including honest coordination with foreign regulators," Marisa Lago, assistant secretary for International Markets and Development at the US Department of the Treasury, told a financial forum in Beijing.
She added that it would be very hard to regain market confidence once lost, a lesson the United States learned from the global financial crisis. Reuters reported last month that regulators in China have asked the Chinese arms of the world's biggest audit firms to review their work on US-listed Chinese companies and give details about the information they may have provided to overseas regulators.
The US industry watchdog has warned against any attempt by China to bar Big Four auditors from shipping summaries of Chinese audits out of that country for review in the United States or elsewhere. The regulator's head said last month that US markets had been unfairly taken advantage of by companies who wanted the benefits of US markets but not rules.