“Accounting rules give financial institutions flexibility about when they choose to recognize venture capital profits.”
“Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.”
“I’m a good learner. I can dig in. I knew nothing about mark-to-market accounting when I started the ‘Enron’ film.”
“Developing safe products for people around the world will mean accounting for a much wider variety of devices, networks, infrastructure, and political environments.”
“I don’t let it bother me too much if someone doesn’t like me. I just figure there’s no accounting for taste. It’s not me, it’s my acting. It’s like if someone doesn’t like someone’s food, they just don’t like my acting.”
“And just remember, every dollar we spend on outsourcing is spent on U.S. goods or invested back in the U.S. market. That’s accounting.”
“Although more than 500 million maritime containers move around the world each year, accounting for 90 per cent of international trade, only 2 per cent are inspected. Strengthening customs and immigration systems is essential.”
“In the tradition of national income accounting, economic policymakers have typically focused on variables such as income, wealth, and consumption.”
“I don’t know technology and engineering. I don’t know accounting.”
“Capital isn’t this pile of money sitting somewhere; it’s an accounting construct.”
“I have gone to great lengths, and in some cases beyond what is required by the reporting guidelines to ensure all of my filings are beyond reproach, by hiring an independent third-party accounting firm to review and audit all of my previous annual financial disclosures.”
“I was never a Certified Public Accountant… I just had a degree in accounting. The reason I was never a Certified Public Accountant was because it would require passing a test, which I would not have been able to do.”
“While it’s trendy to outsource your accounting to a third party, once you hit a certain size, it’s dangerous.”
“I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That’s how things sometimes go.”
“Every quarter, we need to see the portfolio and follow the accounting practice of mark-to-market that values investments according to the prevailing market prices and at the price at which they are made.”
“We don’t understand the equity market well, and so we deploy funds in fixed-income securities, and like any other securities, investment in those securities also need to follow the mark-to-market accounting principle.”
“Companies figured out that the easiest way to make money was to reissue records that the accounting department had paid for years ago and already made a profit.”
“We must investigate without fear or favour the so-called ‘accounting irregularities’ that cause turmoil in the markets and wipe billions off the investments of ordinary South Africans.”
“There’s no business like show business, but there are several businesses like accounting.”
“How many married couples do you know who met over accounting books in a Starbucks?”
“Accounting does not make corporate earnings or balance sheets more volatile. Accounting just increases the transparency of volatility in earnings.”
“Almost all decisions based on cost accounting are utterly wrong.”
“There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.”
“The Glassco Commission was really not interested in good science. It was interested in good accounting.”
“I don’t really enjoy finance and accounting.”
“Republicans and Democrats have used accounting gimmicks and competing government analyses to deceive the public into believing that 2 + 2 = 6. If our leaders cannot agree on the numbers, if ‘facts’ are fictional, how can they possibly have a substantive debate on solutions?”
“In the old days, you would have one lawyer to handle everything: speeding tickets, buying a house, contracts, litigation, real estate, copyrights, leasing, entertainment, intellectual property, forensic accounting, criminal offenses… the list goes on. Now, you have to have a separate lawyer for each one of those categories!”
“Even before he came to power in 1997, Gordon Brown promised to change the accounts to parliament from simple litanies of cash in and cash out, to a more commercial system that took notice of the public property the departments were using. This system is known as resource accounting.”
“With greater extensibility and programmability, bitcoin can evolve to enable transformations in how all forms of property are secured and exchanged, how voting and governance function, including spilling into the automation of commercial law, audit, and accounting.”
“The revenue stream for Social Security benefits comes from payroll taxes, which are credited to the Social Security Trust Fund – accounting for the program’s finances separately from the rest of the budget.”
“You can’t make a manager have a coach he doesn’t want. I can’t make the head of the accounting department work with someone he doesn’t want.”
“Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation’s ledger books through false accounting.”
“Regulations for international accounting and funding will have to be examined to identify policies that inadvertently discourage institutional investors from putting their resources into longer-term, illiquid assets.”
“My mom works at an accounting firm; my dad’s a math teacher.”
“Accounting was the course that helped me more than anything.”
“I don’t really care about money. I find money boring and accounting boring, so I’m probably not going to ever make a lot of money.”
“There are no accounting issues, no trading issues, no reserve issues, no previously unknown problem issues.”
“The bailout of Fannie Mae is completely off the books. It’s going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet nobody is placing this in any type of column in accounting for federal debt.”
“If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.”
“If you want an accounting of your worth, count your friends.”
“Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.”
“We account for one-sixth of the forces of gravity we see in the universe. There is no known objects accounting for most of the effective gravity in the universe. Something is making stuff move that is not anything we have ever touched.”
“I was getting a degree in accounting, and I was going to go off and account. And as it worked out, I haven’t accounted for anything since.”
“The U.S. tax code was written by A students. Every April 15, we have to pay somebody who got an A in accounting to keep ourselves from being sent to jail.”
“You have various institutions like law firms and accounting firms which bill by the hour. I’m really against that. You have an incentive to go slowly, be there as long as possible, to over-research things and over-staff.”
“Some of what I consider my best work, and some of the best films that I’ve ever worked on, kind of disappear without a trace. There’s no accounting for it. Something connects, or something doesn’t.”
“We have a remarkably complete picture in many ways – and it could be that we’re not accounting for something that’s almost three-quarters of the entire universe.”
“I actually studied accounting in college. So I’m a CPA.”
“The concept of fair value accounting is correct and useful, but the application during periods of crisis is problematic. It’s another one of those unintended consequences of making a rule that’s supposed to be good that turns out the other way.”
“We have the most crude accounting tools. It’s tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn’t tell us the things that we need to know.”
“Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.”
“Don’t ever let your business get ahead of the financial side of your business. Accounting, accounting, accounting. Know your numbers.”
“I almost drowned in a hot tub at a writing workshop once after I had some drinks without accounting for how the high elevation would impact my tolerance.”
“I came up with the idea for what later became Paychex in 1970 when I was working for Electronic Accounting Systems, a company that sold payroll processing to companies with 50 to 1,000 employees.”
“Electronic Accounting Systems processed my little payrolls like one big payroll. I did the selling, and the people I hired did most of the operations.”
“By the end of 1978, we had 11 partners and six franchisees, we were operating in 22 cities, and we had about 6,000 clients. We had left Electronic Accounting Systems and were doing our own processing on our own computers.”
“Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services – from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants – are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.”
“There are tens of thousands of bank branches and 4,000 currency chests. We need to be careful and try that this is a number which is not a mere estimate but a verified number both physically and in the accounting sense.”
“No one would suggest completely ignoring news about your investments. Enron investors, for example, would have been well served to sell once early reports of accounting irregularities surfaced. But the key is to keep news in context and act only if further reflection or study indicates that the core thesis for an investment has changed.”
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