For all the salutary shock of Asia's financial crisis, South Korean companies can still cook their books. After the crisis hit South Korea in 1997, the government watchdog for accounting standards tightened up the existing lax rules, but there is still a long way to go. Over the past three years, one in every three companies the watchdog has selected at random turns out to have violated the rules. A study recently published by PricewaterhouseCoopers, an international accounting firm, finds that South Korea has the most opaque standards of accounting and corporate governance of the 35 countries it surveyed.
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