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 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.… (mer)