Painting by numbers
13 September 2012
Creative accounting is difficult to detect and even harder to control. Here’s why report writing is never a case of black and white
The hot topic of the 1980s, "creative accounting" came under fire for producing intentionally misleading accounts. In the 1990s, Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the Accounting Standards Board (ASB), led a tough campaign against the practice. Its goal was to clean up financial reporting and to ensure that companies produced accounts which were "genuinely balanced,...