Why Must Accountants Be Required to Practice Their Signatures Starting from May 1, 2018?

This is a new regulation on administrative sanctions regarding accounting and auditing violations, but it is not entirely new compared to previous regulations. In fact, the Accounting Law 2015 has also stipulated that "the signature on accounting documents of one person must be consistent."

The issue here is how to understand "inconsistent" and "incorrect."

In reality, there have been many debates surrounding the interpretation of this regulation. Many opinions suggest that according to Point d, Clause 2, Article 8 of Decree 41/2018/ND-CP, the signatures of the same person must be 100% identical without any deviation.

Ensuring that ten signatures are ten exactly identical signatures is very challenging. Thus, many opinions argue that it is not necessarily the case that if the signatures on accounting documents are not identical, they will be penalized. In other words, the consistency of the signature here is understood in a relative sense. Therefore, the new Decree uses the terms "inconsistent" and "incorrect" instead of "not identical."

Without specific guidelines, this will continue to cause anxiety for businesses, particularly for the accounting department. This is because assessing whether a signature on accounting documents constitutes a sanctionable violation is entirely at the discretion of the authorized person.

Therefore, to avoid trouble with signatures, accountants may need to practice their signatures to ensure a high degree of similarity, aiming for "a hundred signatures as one."

- Doan Trinh -

>> CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE IN VIETNAMESE