Enron. WorldCom. What comes to your mind when you think of these organizations? The use of variable interest entities and misleading classifications of assets to misstate earnings. Accounting ...

IMGCAP(1)]Ah! Creative accounting! No! Stop! There is only one way to account for activity and that is the right way. Processing Content Account for activity according to the textbooks—that is the ...

A new report says Lehman Bros. used accounting tricks to cover up the fact it had been insolvent for weeks before it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008. Lynn Turner, former chief accountant for ...

“Creative accounting” is really bad. Except when it’s good. Say that in a roomful of managers, and you get nervous laughter. For me, it evokes a wonderful old New Yorker cartoon by Robert Weber, where ...

Creative companies rarely comply with standard business templates. Their working practices, pay scales and – yes even in these austere times – expense accounts, would give many a traditional finance ...

Corporate financial statements, with their numbers calculated down to the dollar and even the penny, have always seemed to be etched in stone. In these Enron-tainted days, regulators and investors are ...

The COVID-19 outbreak has brought out some creative accounting at companies, as executives attempt to gauge the impact of the pandemic on their businesses and how they would have performed if the ...

"Creative accounting" is really bad. Except when it's good. Say that in a roomful of managers, and you get nervous laughter. For me, it evokes a wonderful old New Yorker cartoon by Robert Weber, where ...

Among the hundreds of pages in the recent budget statement, you might be forgiven for missing Gordon Brown’s very interesting intervention into the UK’s creative industries, particularly design. As ...