Creative Accounting Quotes

Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.

Some American companies operate in the gray area between legitimacy and outright fraud … where the accounting is being perverted.

Trust-me companies are companies whose financial results gallop ahead of their businesses, companies with seemingly perfect control over their quarterly sales and profits. Companies whose financial statements are loaded with footnotes: companies that short-sellers often attack but rarely dent.

Any crooked bookkeeper's books are balanced.

Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time.

If people are going to be cooking the books, you're in trouble.

Behind the ambitious, creative talent that is Hollywood lies a darker side of the entertainment industry little appreciated by the ordinary moviegoer. It's an opaque world of film financing, revenue accretion, and minimal profit share.

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt.

I think my mother was like a small company which, because things are not ship-shape, keeps two sets of books, one for the auditors and then there's the other one.

Aggressive accounting does not mean illegal accounting.

As so often happened during the dot-com bubble days, the revenues that AOL and PurchasePro were counting on did not materialize. And instead of confronting that harsh reality, AOL and PurchasePro cooked up a scheme to inflate PurchasePro's revenues.

My last comment was, though, that Congress has cooked the books.

So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish - you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.

I have "fat-guy syndrome." If they give me $50 million to make a movie, I'll try to make it look like it cost a hundred. If they give me $60 million, I'll try to make it look like it cost $120.

Accounting consequences do not influence our operating or capital-allocation decisions. When acquisition costs are similar, we much prefer to purchase $2 of earnings that is not reportable by us under standard accounting principles than to purchase $1 of earnings that is reportable.

Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.

The banks use rather surreal accounting practices.

While one can't always begrudge the wealth of people who have at least produced something of value, the rich of the financial world don't make anything but more money. They're not creative, aside from, perhaps, in accounting.

It is easier to use accounting gimmicks than it is to make hard political choices