I worked for a company once where the local office managers were known to hold back profit from invoices in good months to use to meet goals down the road when they had a bad month. They just would wait and log the paid invoice in whatever month they wanted the money to show up. When the economy started to turn south, a few guys apparently started overreporting profit with phantom invoices that would be "delayed for payment" and would get rid of the invoice later when expecting to have a good month to balance it out. Well for quite a few of them, the bad months carried on for several years. When the company was bought out by a competitor, the time came to eventually merge the accounting systems. When they started that process, they quickly realized that they had several years worth of unreported losses in many of their offices from those fake invoices that would have to show up in on the quarterly reports order to square the books. So senior management did exactly what the office managers had done...they kept announcing delay after delay in the accounting system integration until they had a really good quarter...then announced a one time charge of well over a million dollars to cover all the fudged numbers that showed up during the transition. This was long before Sarbanes-Oxley and long after I had left, but it was still amazing to me to see their accounting transition stretch out to beyond 2 years in length just so they wouldn't have to report a bad charge against a bad quarter.
