Cooking the books

See this article on companies using math to hide their true financial status. (It's very much like what Republicans do with their budget proposals based on bogus trickle-down ideology.) It's one reason the '08 financial crisis happened. Rating companies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's accepted big banks cooked books on those junk mortgage securities. Even a cursory audit revealed they were indeed junk. I personally saw this in the insurance companies for which I worked, manipulating accounting to hide losses and debits to falsely inflate the bottom line in order to get good ratings from bad accounting that was never validated.