Authentic or Illusory in the Professional Accountants Activity - on the Borderline Between Creative Accounting and Accounting Fraud

Author:Univ. Prof. PhD Ana MORARIU, PhD Student Ionel JIANU

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Keywords:creative accounting, accounting fraud, audit

Abstract:
In the last two decades, serious accounting scandals occurred in large companies (Enron and WorldCom). It was the moment when the problem of creative accounting and accounting fraud has come on the agenda of business firms and governments. Creative accounting regroups the techniques based on the spaces of liberty and the options presented by the accounting normaliser which allows and obliges the managers of a company or a group of companies to fix the level of the result inside a delimitated space. Unlike creative accounting, fraud comes from an illegal deed, the difference between creative accounting and fraud consisting in the intentioned and illegal deed which generated the anomaly. This study examples the most often met cases, which are at the limit between creative accounting and accounting fraud, with the purpose to reflect upon some limits of the audit procedures which are meant to identify the situations which generate the accounting fraud.\r\n

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