Xiaoming's mother gives him two coins and tells him to cast one into the donation box in front of Matsu's (
Xiaoming ran out happily, but he inadvertently dropped one of the coins down a drain.
He immediately clasped his hands and said: "Mother Matsu, I am sorry. Your money has dropped into the drain."
Then he, with a clean conscience, buys himself a bowl of soybean curd.
If someone who handles other people's finances acts like Xiaoming -- counting losses as others' and profits his own -- he is not fulfilling his responsibilities.
The principles and methodology of accounting were developed to prevent this kind of self-serving acts and cronyism.
Through account details, it can be clarified which sum of money should go to which person, and which loss or profit belongs to whom.
Every modern company needs to have books and someone to do the accounting.
One simple but important principle in accounting is that if money belonging to two different subjects is put together, each subject should have an account to reflect his rightful interests.
For example, when we deposit our money at a bank, the bank must open a separate account for each depositor to record how much money has come in and gone out, as well as how much has been accrued in interests.
Otherwise, who would dare to put his or her money in there?
Soong's family said he was helping the KMT handle a few sums of money.
But the sums of money were lumped together with the Soong family money in two of their accounts.
In the light of the aforementioned basic principles, Soong's financial advisor Chen Pi-yun (陳碧雲) -- who has studied accounting and worked at a financial institution for a long period -- should know that she should have kept an account record detailing the KMT's rightful interests.
If she did have such a record, then she should have been able to come up with an explanation immediately after the scandal, instead of telling one lie after another.
She would not have needed to hold three press conferences in a month since the scandal broke. Until now, there is still no plausible explanation as to the purpose of the key NT$140 million sum.
Given her professional training and ability, Chen could not have made such a serious mistake.
If she was too lazy to keep an account record, all she needed to do was separate the two sums by transferring all the KMT money to Soong Chen-yuan's (
That she failed to do such a simple act is an indication that she could very possibly have viewed all that money as belonging to the Soong family.
Given that Chen has saved all the receipts involved, and given that she also helps quite a few people manage their finances, it is quite impossible that she did not keep account balance records for such colossal funds.
One of the possible reasons why she was unable to come up with an account record to back up her defense was that the records do not earmark which money belongs to who.
In this case, brandishing account records will require her to invent an endless string of explanations about the transactions.
In fact, the accounts controlled by this kind of money manager have been the same targets of government investigations into tax evasion and other criminal activities.
Once scandals break, one of the top priorities of the investigative authorities is to seize account books.
However, the Ministry of Finance's reluctance to chase after account books in Soong's scandal is understandable, given the political ramifications of the case.
It is so lamentable that legislator Hsieh Chi-ta (
Because the government hasn't made efforts to seize the account records, the Soongs should voluntarily hand them over to judicial authorities, instead of saying that they simply don't exist or have been burnt.
That is because, at least from a financial manager's viewpoint, these assertions can prove that the Soongs have long viewed the money as their own.
Chen Po-chih is a professor of economics at National Taiwan University
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