Creative Accounts Department

The creative accountancy indicates the whole of the techniques used in accountancy by a company to modify the presentation of its accounts in a direction more favorable to its waitings.

This expression corresponds to the translation of the Anglo-Saxon expression “creative accounting” . One also speaks about “imaginative accountancy”, or “accountancy of intention”. This last expression, more pejorative perhaps, suggests however that the presentation of the accounts is not an operation stripped of ulterior motives on behalf of the company.

The concept of “creative accountancy” is a certain success, in particular near the media, because in particular of the accounting scandals and accountants of Enron, of WorldCom, Parmalat… which knew a particularly important repercussion.

For certain specialists however, creative accountancy recovers for a good part a unit of practices known for a long time. Accountancy is not - as opposed to what thinks sometimes the public opinion - an exact science. Certain evaluations (see reserves for example) can be carried out with a certain margin of freedom of appreciation. Moreover, vis-a-vis a given problem (damping of an immobilization), the company has several choices. Freedom of appreciation, possibilities of choice: it is in this case trying to choose the solution which is appropriate best for than the company claims to show at the time of the presentation of its accounts, without for all this one can speak about fraud in a strict sense, but rather of legal preparing .

Despite everything, in a context where countable information and financial cheek a particularly important role taking into account the pressure exerted by the financial markets on the companies as regards profitability, temptations of frauds exists. So much so that it seems necessary to specify and to harmonize the accounting practices.

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