Howard M. Schilit

This is a great summary of the most-used tricks to sliding around in the gray areas of GAAP accounting in the US. These specific techniques likely represent 80% or more of the different tricks used from 1990-2007 by large corporations to manipulate their earnings and other performance, one of the main benefits of which is increasing their stock price. If the book was used by rank and file investors to look in detail at annual reports of their portfolio companies, they'd have a good early show more warning signal for the typical practices. And it includes sometimes shocking but always interesting true case studies of these techniques. A drawback might be that it is dated or does not include some more sophisticated techniques. show less

Very in-depth look at the different accounting tricks and assumptions used in order to beef up a company's performance, with plenty of helpful real life examples featuring companies' actual financial information and footnotes. Useful for investors and accounting students

Straight-forward introduction to various accounting techniques that can be used to manipulate earnings.