Twenty years ago, CFO gave Enron finance chief Andrew S. Fastow a CFO Excellence Award in the category of ‘capital structure management.’ … I remember Fastow well, as I wrote that October 1999 story. … What I had failed to capture, in a story meant to celebrate Fastow as a CFO wunderkind, was his shrewd manipulation of the accounting rules … ‘The fundamental problem is this: Virtually all the safeguards that have been built into the system are compliance and legal procedures to catch rulebreakers. But rulebreakers are only part of the problem. The more insidious and dangerous problem is the rule ‘users’—the rule exploiters who find the loopholes.’
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