Financial Statement Manipulation

What is Financial Statement Manipulation?

Financial statement manipulation refers to the practice of using creative accounting tricks to make a company’s financial statements reflect what the company wants its performance to look like rather than its actual performance.

Despite numerous steps taken by legislatures and regulatory bodies – such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – to curb manipulation of financial statements, especially by publicly traded companies, the practice is still widespread.

Why Do Companies Manipulate Their Financial Statements?

High-paid executives who run major corporations can be tempted to “cook the books” on their financials for several potential reasons, such as:

1. Feeling intense pressure to show a positive picture

Public company executives may give in to the enormous pressure they’re under, with large pay packages and expectations they will direct their companies to ever-increasing growth and profitability, amid an increasingly competitive business landscape.

2. Tapering investors’ expectations

Manipulation might be something as relatively innocent as not wanting investors to develop unrealistic expectations. What happens if the company got lucky on a number of fronts, and it ended up achieving its best year ever? An executive might think investors will expect to see these excellent numbers going forward. Therefore, the executive might change accounting entries to make the year look less incredible.

In the example above, the guilty party isn’t even manipulating the numbers to try to make the company look better – instead, they’re making it look worse. And their motives aren’t terribly nefarious – they’re not actively scheming to rip someone off.

3. Triggering executive bonuses

A very common motivation for manipulating financial statements is to meet sales/revenue goals that trigger a big bonus for upper-level management. The structure of such incentive bonuses has often been criticized as being, in effect, an incentive for an executive to “cheat.”

One option to prevent this would be to offer performance bonuses based on a non-financial metric. For example, the CEO and CFO could be paid bonuses if customer service satisfaction rises five percentage points.

Contributing Factors

1. The lack of standardized accounting standards

Along with the structure of management incentives, there are other factors in play that appear to contribute to an environment where fraud is almost commonplace. One of the factors is the lack of standardized accounting standards.

While there are many commonalities, it was planned that the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) would come to an agreement on a single set of universally recognized accounting practices.

As of 2023, it looks less likely that such a complete, universal set of practices and standards will ever be created. The lack of consensus on exactly how corporate accounting should be completed makes it easier to “creatively” interpret accounting rules.

2. Conflicts of interest relationship between companies and accounting firms

The Enron scandal clearly pointed out another contributing factor to financial statement manipulation: potential conflicts of interest between companies and the accounting firms that audit them.

How Financial Statements Are Manipulated

Manipulation of financial statements always involves doing one of two things – either manipulating records to inflate apparent revenue or manipulating them to reduce apparent expenses or liabilities.

More specifically, here are some of the accounting tricks that are used to provide a false picture of a company’s actual financial condition:

• Recording revenue prior to supplying goods or services
• Reporting income from investments or capital obtained by taking out a loan as business revenue
• Capitalizing ordinary business expenses, thus shifting them from the income statement to the balance sheet
• Inaccurately reporting liabilities – or altogether neglecting to report them at all

A surprisingly simple method of manipulating financial statements is that of inflating assets with false inventory count values. For example, a company may do an ordinary inventory count, but then add 100 items to each count – so, 500 desktop computers become 600 desktop computers, or 150 computer monitors become 250 monitors, etc.

If the average inventory item value is $350, and there are 10 categories of items, then, using such a creative inventory addition technique, the company can quickly increase the value of its total assets by $350,000.

How to Protect Yourself From Financial Statement Manipulation

Individual investors need to do all they can to avoid being the victim of financial fraud, including fraudulently altered financial statements. The best way to do it is simply to obtain a strong financial education. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available to help you educate yourself. CFI offers a FREE course on “How to Read Financial Statements.”

Knowing how to read and understand the three main financial statements – the income statement, the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement – will enable you to more easily spot when some of the numbers don’t quite seem to add up.

Understanding the actual components of the income statement, for example, will also help you to better assess the validity of the projections the CEO makes during the “guidance” and Q&A portions of a company’s earnings call.

Additional Resources

Thank you for reading CFI’s guide to Financial Statement Manipulation. To keep advancing your career, the additional resources below will be useful:

• Accounting Method
• IFRS vs US GAAP
• Fiscal Year
• Top Accounting Scandals
• See all accounting resources