An auditor at one large firm not involved in the Enron case said it was common for auditors to face creative ways to use accounting rules. "These issues can become very complex and very fact-specific," he said. "You have a lot of sharp pencils on Wall Street cooking up transactions to achieve a specific result. Oftentimes, they understand the accounting rules as well as or better than we do."
Or, as Mr. [Paul] Brown, the N.Y.U. professor [and accounting departmental chairman], put it: "It's the old adage of a F.A.S.B. rule. It takes four years to write it, and it takes four minutes for an astute investment banker to get around it."
[BTW, Doug, I tried to retrieve the Lenin remark -- concerning the unreliability of capitalist bookkeeping -- that you mocked at the Essen conference last year in remarks posted to the LBO list. Unfortunately, the list archive for that period seems to be down. Would you be able to post that timely quote again?]
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com