It’s likely safe to say—creative accounting’s been around for as long as accounting itself.
In 1494, for example, mathematician and ‘father of modern accounting’ Luca Pacioli wrote of Venetian merchants willfully rendering their ledgers illegible. In the Gilded Age, inflating assets and understating liabilities was standard practice across a booming system. And who can forget the “channel stuffing” of the 2000s?
