Tough Businesspersons Don't Cry For Creative Accounting
Sourav Mitra -
Tuesday, December 25, 2007 1:04 PM
Businessmen and businesswomen are supposed to be born to generate business profits by servicing human needs and pay their taxes. When they begin to depend on creative accounting to cook up profits they begin to lose their reason to exist; they begin to feed a cancer that will ultimately do more harm to more groups of people.
Creative accounting is probably nurtured by the illusion that it takes tough guys and girls to risk cooking books. Only the meek follow rules.
But that is an inverted logic.
Creative accounting is the recourse of people who are afraid.
They are afraid to have their business acumen doubted. Afraid to admit mistakes. Afraid to admit they have no real business remedies in mind. Afraid to have investments or loans denied. Afraid to face the stakeholders. Afraid to lose their jobs or their bonuses. Afraid to lose face. They are so afraid of whatever that they are even prepared to kill their business for it.
So these so-called 'tough' guys and girls submit their fate into the hands of creative accountants and that more often than not jeopardizes the business completely. The casualties litter the business history case books.
The real tough businesspersons find ways to generate real business profits and hire accountants only to keep the score, ensure compliances and look after the pennies (which outrageous travel expense claim should be absolutely denied, whether any bank would refinance the loans for a quarter of a basis point less, etc.).
Otherwise the tough would admit their mistakes and quit before their businesses run amok and collapse in the wake of its own destruction.
[P.S. This piece is for business persons in the truest sense of the term who may be leaning on creative accountants because their businesses have gone awry or they have been led astray by pathologically creative accountants who believe accounts are nothing if they are not creative.
It is not for criminals who use legal businesses either as facades for illegal ones, or as vehicles or victims for their grand fraud and embezzlement campaigns. Criminals cannot even dream outside of creative accounts]