Quotes-
These are some great quotes I came across in my CPE training. At 40 hours/year I’ve done over 1,000 hours of training in accounting, valuation, forensic, ethics & related areas. Note some of the quotes below made sense at the time but later were hugely problematic. On the other hand, some of the quotes are very old and still hold true.
A gray area where the accounting is being perverted; where managers are cutting corners; and where earnings reports reflect the desires of management rather than the underlying financial performance of the company. —Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the SEC
A merchant wanted to know how much two plus two was. The accountant, after ensuring no one could hear them, murmured in his ear: “How much do you want it to be?” —Anonymous Venetian
A balance sheet is inevitably false, because either things are valued for what they have cost, and what they have cost is not generally what they’re worth, or we pretend to write them down for what they’re worth and, how can we know the value of something we don’t know when and at what price we will sell? —Auguste Detoeuf (1883–1947), founder of Alsthom
Fraud is the daughter of greed. —Jonathan Gash
The loopholes and the flexibility of the accounting standards allow for a wide variety of financial results. —James A. Largay (about the lessons from the Enron case)
The world’s leading company. —Plaque in the lobby of Enron’s headquarters
Greed is good. —Gordon Gekko (in the movie Wall Street)
Mr. Madoff is one of the masters of the New York Stock Exchange. —Wall Street Journal, 1992
Corruption, embezzlement, fraud, these are all characteristics which exist everywhere. It is regrettably the way human nature functions, whether we like it or not. What successful economies do is keep it to a minimum. No one has ever eliminated any of that stuff. —Alan Greenspan (former president of the US Federal Reserve, 2007)