Toil and Trouble → Its about curb appeal, period.

Having worked for two Dot Bombs and having seen the sausage being made I can say this: Accounting has become something it was never meant to be, its the supermodel of the business units in most "new thinking" companies and it was inspired by VC's giving a nod and a wink on how to best pimp companies pre-IPO.

Accounting was meant to be a dry statement of historic factual results and conservative, quantifiable forecasts, instead it is more of an extension of the marketing department/CEO roadshow. Dressing up results is expected, performing radical plastic surgery is encouraged and dimming the lights while putting lipstick on a pig is all too common. The problem is, that this spin game has no end and you must spin faster with every quarter to keep up the charade. In the Dot com world, going IPO was the goal, once that was achieved, the VC's got their money and the insiders who dressed things up would keep up the pretense long enough to keep up the share price while they "trickled out" their shares. This only worked until the 4Q of 1999, when an alarming number of these pigs started wobbling in their high heels immediately after IPO or in some cases pre-IPO.

Where do you think all these "talented" accounting minds went after their get rich IPO schemes fell apart? BINGO - fortune 500 companies, who could now get all the benefits of dot.com accounting without having to actually improve their sales. Only problem is, these companies are already public, so there is no IPO coming out party at which the fat cats can quietly slip out the back door with heaps of cash. There was an alternative "event" however, which would allow them to cash in. THE MERGER and ACQUISITION game. It created sufficient movement and market attention to allow management to cash out at its conclusion without much problem. But what happens when you are as big as regulators will let you become? Answer: WORLDCOM and ENRON. After buying all that could be bought and sucking in their gut for as long as possible, these two pigs eventually had to produce at a level no company could achieve due to their crushing debt load. We all know what happened next.

HERE PIGGIE PIGGIE PIGGIE!!

Well, now the slaughterhouse is at full power and the pigs are being marched up the ramps to meet their fate... and taking the hopes, aspirations, and dreams of millions with them.

These are the people the F.B.I. should be kicking in the doors on... The C.E.O.'s, the C.F.O.'s, the Board of Directors... not the guy twiddling with his cable modem bandwidth cap.

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Accounting was meant to be a dry statement of historic factual results and conservative, quantifiable forecasts, instead it is more of an extension of the marketing department/CEO roadshow.

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I absolutely agree, but it will never change until parties with authoritative power (ie. accounting firms) are held accountable (hah, not a pun). I expect executives to spin information about their company to suit their interests (investors: caveat emptor).