Here’s how another former employee describes
the process: ‘‘Say you have a dog, but you need
to create a duck on the financial statements.
Fortunately, there are specific accounting rules
for what constitutes a duck: yellow feet, white
covering, and orange beak. So you take the dog
and paint its feet yellow and its fur white and
you paste an orange plastic beak on its nose, and
then you say to your accountants, ‘This is a
duck! Don’t you agree that it’s a duck?’ And
the accountants say, ‘Yes, according to the rules,
this is a duck.’ Everybody knows that it’s a dog,
not a duck, but that doesn’t matter because
you’ve met the rules for calling it a duck.’’