Creative accounting practices pdf Continue Euphemism, referring to unethical accounting practice Of Book Preparation, redirects here. For an episode of Black Books, see Cooking Books (Black Books episode). For the New York-tv cooking programme, watch the Cook Books Program (TV program). Part of the series onAccounting Historical Expenses Permanent Purchasing Power Office Tax Main Types Audit Budget Expenditures Forensic Fund State Office Social Tax Key Concepts Period Accrual Permanent Purchasing Power Economic Essence Fair Value Going Historical Concerns Historical Costs Compliance Principle Materiality Income Recognition Unit Account Selected Cash Account Cash Expenses Goods, Sold Amortization/Amortization of Equity Expenses Goodwill Passion principles Financial Reporting Annual Report Balance Sheet Cash Flow Income Office Discussion Notes to Financial Reporting Accountant Bank Reconciliation Of Debits and Loans Double Entry System FIFO and LIFO Journal Ledger / General Registry T Accounts Forensic Balance Audit Of Financial Firms Report by People and Organization Accountants Accounting Organizations but deviate from the spirit of these rules with questionable accounting ethics, in particular misrepresenting the results in favor of training, or the firm that hired the accountant. They are characterized by excessive complications and the use of new ways of characterizing income, assets or liabilities and the intention to influence readers with respect to interpretations desired by the authors. Sometimes the terms are also innovative or aggressive. Another common synonym is the preparation of books. Creative accounting is often used in tandem with outright financial fraud (including securities fraud), and the boundaries between them are blurred. Creative accounting techniques have been known since ancient times and appear all over the world in various forms. Every company in the country is tinkering with its profits. Each set of published accounts is based on books that have been neatly cooked or fully fried. The figures that are fed twice a year to invest the public have all been changed to protect the culprits. This is the biggest deception since the Trojan horse. ... In fact this deception is all in perfectly good taste. It's perfectly legal. It's creative accounting. Ian Griffiths in 1986, describing creative accounting, the term is usually understood to refer to the systematic distortion of the true and the assets of corporations or other organizations. Creative accounting was at the heart of a number of accounting scandals, and many proposals for accounting reform were typically based on an updated analysis of capital and production factors that would correctly reflect how value added. Newspaper and television journalists have suggested that the stock market downturn in 2002 was caused by reports of accounting irregularities at Enron, Mircom and other companies in the United States. According to critic David Erenstein, the term creative accounting was first used in 1968 in the film Producers Mel Brooks, where it is also known as Hollywood Accounting. The motives behind creative accounting are the main purpose of creative accounting - to present the business in the best possible light, usually by manipulating recorded profits or costs. Company managers who participate in creative accounting may have a variety of situational motives for this, including: Market and Shareholder Expectations Profits Personal Incentive Bonus Related to The Payment of Benefits from Shares and Stock Options Security Personal Satisfaction Fraud Fraud Management Taxation Taxation Manager for Self-Managed Mergers and Acquisitions/Examples of Creative Accounting Schemes Management Profit Article when managers use financial statements and transaction structuring to alter financial statements to either mislead some stakeholders about the company's underlying economic results, or influence contractual results that depend on accounting records. Hollywood's main article: Hollywood accounting, practiced by some Hollywood film studios, creative accounting can be used to hide the movie's revenue to distort the profits promised to some of the film's participants. In fact, participants in the film's gross income remain unchanged, but the participants' profits are presented with a deflated or negative number on profitability, resulting in less or no payments to them after the success of the film. Notable examples of cheating bona fide profit participants include Darth Vader actor David Prowse (with $729M adjusted gross income on Return of the Jedi) and Forrest Gump novel writer Winston Groom (with $661M gross theatrical income) - both of whom were paid $0 for their participation profits due to films being in the red. Tobashi Scheme Home article: Tobashi Scheme This form of creative accounting-is now considered a criminal offence in Japan, where it originated-includes the sale, swap or other form of temporary trade liability of one company with another company in the holding portfolio, often exclusively to hide the losses of the first firm. These schemes were popular in Japan in the 1980s, before the government introduced stricter civil laws and eventually criminalized the practice. The Enron scandal revealed that Enron had extensively used subcorporations to offload debts and conceal its true losses in tobashi. Lehman Brothers' Repo 105 Scheme Home Article: Repo 105 Lehman Brothers used buyout agreements to bolster profitability reports with their repo 105 scheme overseen by accountancy firm Ernst Young. The scheme consisted of misreporting the repo (promise to re-buy the liability or asset after its sale) as a sale, and timing it exactly so that half of the transaction was completed before the reporting period of profitability, half after, hence strengthening the profitability of the numbers on paper. The New York prosecutor's office filed a lawsuit against EY for allowing accounting fraud related to the secret seizure of tens of billions of dollars of fixed-income securities from Lehman's balance sheet in order to deceive the public about the true state of Lehman's liquidity. Enron did the same about 10 years ago; in their case, Merrill Lynch helped Enron strengthen profitability close to earnings periods by deliberately entering agreements to buy back Nigerian barges from Enron, only for Enron to buy them out a few months later. The SEC has filed charges and convicted several Merrill Lynch executives of aiding and abetting fraud. Currency swap concealment of Greek debt Goldman Sachs See also: Goldman Sachs - Participation in the European sovereign debt crisis In 2001-2002 Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government after its introduction to the Eurozone to better its deficit numbers by conducting large currency swaps. The deals, worth more than 2.3 billion euros, were technically loans but hidden as currency swaps to circumvent the Maastricht Treaty's rules on limiting member countries' deficits and allowed Greece to hide an effective 1 billion euro loan. After Goldman Sachs developed a financial instrument and sold it to the Greeks - simply overstepped the obligations in the future and deceived investors and the European Union, the president of the investment bank Gary Cohn held another deal in Athens. After Greece abandoned the second deal, the firm sold its Greek swaps to the Greek National Bank and made sure its short and long positions towards Greece were in the balance sheet so that a potential Greek default would not affect Goldman Sachs. Parmalat's incorrect credit-related notes see. also: Parmalat and Financial Fraud (2002-2005) Italian dairy giant Parmalat used a number of creative accounting and wire fraud schemes prior to 2003 that led to the largest bankruptcy in European history. He self-related credit notes using Merrill Lynch through through Special purpose islands and over-take their value into account on the balance sheet. He also forged a $3.9 billion check from Bank of America. The publicly listed company told investors that it had about $2 billion in liabilities (this figure was accepted by its auditors Deloitte and Grant Thornton International), but after a more vigorous review of the bankruptcy procedure, it was revealed that the company's debt was actually $14.5 billion. such as Parmalat billing itself through a subsidiary called Epicurum. It was also revealed that its CEO Calisto Tanzi ordered the creation of shell accounts and transferred 900 million euros to his private travel company. Offshoreing and tax evasion See also: Offshore financial center, offshore leaks and tax evasion to avoid income taxes, multinational corporations often use offshore subsidiaries in order to use a creative accounting method known as Minimum Profit Accounting. A subsidiary is created in a tax haven, often in the same way as a shell company, and then charges large fees to the main corporation, effectively minimizing or completely destroying the profits of the main corporation. In most parts of the European Union and the United States, this practice is perfectly legal and is often carried out in plain sight or with the explicit approval of tax regulators. Nike, Inc. famously used offshoring by selling its Swoosh logo to a Bermuda-based subsidiary of a special purpose company for a nominal sum, and then continued to charge itself with licensing fees that Nike Inc. had to pay a subsidiary to use its own brand in Europe. The Dutch tax authorities were aware and approved of this siphoning structure, but did not publish the private agreement they had with Nike. The licensing fees totaled $3.86 billion over three years and were discovered because of an unrelated lawsuit, as well as Paradise Papers. In 2014, Bermuda's deal with the Dutch authorities expired, and Nike transferred profits to another offshore subsidiary, the Dutch Limited Partnership (CV, short for Commanditaire Vennootschaap, known as Kommanditgesellschaft). Through a Dutch tax loophole, CV is owned by individuals who reside in the Netherlands, tax-free. Using this structure saved Nike more than $1 billion in taxes a year and reduced its global tax rate to 13.1%; The company is being pursued for billions of dollars in back taxes in litigation by several governments for this tax evasion.