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‘Forging and Selling Invoices to Avoid Taxes’ in China Is No Longer Punishable By Death

Posted on by Caleb Newquist

We Americans do love a good firing squad/lethal injection/electric chair/hangin’ but the Chinese make us look like a bunch of pansies by comparison. However, after several millennia, China might be getting soft in its old age. As the Associated Press reports, some economic crimes have been pulled from the “do this and die” list:

Thirteen economic, nonviolent offenses will be removed from the list of 68 crimes punishable by death, said Lang Sheng, who heads a legal committee for the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature. The 13 crimes include forging and selling invoices to avoid taxes, and smuggling cultural relics and precious metals such as gold out of the country.

However, it should be noted, “[A]n expert said the move was unlikely to significantly reduce executions, since people convicted of those crimes in the past have rarely received the maximum penalty and capital punishment can still be used to punish other economic crimes such as corruption.”

We’re not intimately familiar with all the potential criminal tax pitfalls in China, so it’s safe to assume there are plenty of other tax crimes that will still get you the dirt nap. International tax scofflaws should tread carefully.

China drops death penalty for some economic crimes [AP via Gawker]

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What’s the Deal with Groupon’s Adjusted CSOI?

According to Bloomberg, Groupon’s operating income and other accounting trickery habits are being studied by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, part of a routine review of the site’s IPO. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

But Groupon seems pretty transparent about the unreliability of their methodology. I guess this is to say “don’t rely on this information, we’re kind of making some of these numbers up” so investors can’t say they weren’t warned.

Check out this June 2, 2011 SEC filing:

Our use of Adjusted CSOI has limitations as an analytical tool, and you should not consider this measure in isolation or as a substitute for analysis of our results as reported under GAAP. Some of these limitations are:

• Adjusted CSOI does not reflect the significant cash investments that we currently are making to acquire new subscribers;

• Adjusted CSOI does not reflect the potentially dilutive impact of issuing equity-based compensation to our management team and employees or in connection with acquisitions;

• Adjusted CSOI does not reflect any interest expense or the cash requirements necessary to service interest or principal payments on any indebtedness that we may incur;

• Adjusted CSOI does not reflect any foreign exchange gains and losses;

• Adjusted CSOI does not reflect any tax payments that we might make, which would represent a reduction in cash available to us;

• Adjusted CSOI does not reflect changes in, or cash requirements for, our working capital needs; and

• other companies, including companies in our industry, may calculate Adjusted CSOI differently or may use other financial measures to evaluate their profitability, which reduces the usefulness of it as a comparative measure.

Because of these limitations, Adjusted CSOI should not be considered as a measure of discretionary cash available to us to invest in the growth of our business. When evaluating our performance, you should consider Adjusted CSOI alongside other financial performance measures, including various cash flow metrics, net loss and our other GAAP results.

Better yet, AQPQ explains the math behind ACSOI:

Groupon acknowledges that it is losing money when profits and losses are measured in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The firm claims, however, that its profits and losses are more meaningfully measured by a metric they call Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income (ACSOI).

How does this number differ from profits and losses that are measured in accordance with GAAP? ACSOI apparently includes all of the revenues, but only some of the expenses, that are recognized by GAAP. By excluding certain significant expenses, Groupon manages to convert its losses into profits.

So what is the SEC going to find? Accounting methods already confessed to by the perps? Big deal.