Financial Hacking -- Giving Creative Accounting a Good Name

Originally posted on the O'Reilly Radar, this is a post I wrote about the positive side of "creativity" in finance and accounting:

Financial Hacking -- Giving Creative Accounting a Good Name

An excerpt:

Most people have a negative opinion of "creative accounting" in much the same way that most people have a negative opinion of "computer hacking", and I think there are some surprising parallels there. Yes, there's a lot of bad actors, like Enron's Andrew Fastow, using financial shell games to enrich themselves and conceal their actions (kind of a financial root kit). But there's also been -- and continues to be -- some amazing innovation, which perhaps is viewed as guilt by association or "too complex" for the general public to understand (again, sounds a lot like perceptions of computer hackers).