A wave of accounting scandals emerging from China in 2011 has caused investment bankers to get more cautious about new offerings, according to a recent BDO poll.

Almost half of the investment bankers who answered BDO's poll expect initial public offerings from China to decline in 2012 as a result of accounting scandals, making investors more skittish while also making Chinese companies more likely to look elsewhere for capital to avoid U.S. regulation. Some investment bankers also believe China-based companies are finding more capital available in Asia-Pacific exchanges, making offerings in the United States less appealing.

Nearly 80 percent of investment bankers said the Chinese accounting scandals – such as Longtop Financial Technologies, Puda Coal, China-Biotics, Sino-Tech Energy and others – have inspired them to increase their due diligence on China-based offerings. Most say they are taking a closer look at internal controls over financial reporting and corporate governance structures. Smaller numbers of bankers are scrutinizing business risks and product or sales trends, according to the survey results.

IPOs on U.S. exchanges represented more than one-fourth of total global IPO proceeds in 2011, a considerable increase from 2010, according to BDO. A little more than one-third of investment bankers in the poll believe the percentage of foreign-based IPOs on U.S exchanges will increase in the coming year, but they expect a smaller share of those IPOs to arise from Asia.

The results are not entirely surprising to Lee Graul a partner in the capital markets practice at BDO USA., given economic concerns in virtually every country in the world. Bankers have made their concerns about Chinese IPOs known, he says, and now the insurance sector is starting to show some concern as well. “So much of the Asia-Pacific market works on rumors,” he says. “It's a delicate situation. There are some companies accused of accounting fraud that aren't guilty and others that are. When the negative press hits, the bankers and investors start getting very cautious and tend to shy away from those investments.”

The BDO poll suggests investment bankers expect most of the IPOs taking places on foreign exchanges to favor Hong Kong, followed by Euronext, London, and Shanghai.