Cooking the books?

"WHICH companies would be doing a lot worse without creative accounting?" wonders that bastion of financial reporting, The New York Post. Apple and Yahoo are among the five companies picked out by Standard & Poor's, because of the IT company habit of "incentivizing" staff with share options. The staff have to sell their stock to cash in, and that raises more questions. AP has a story about senior Apple executives selling shares before profit warnings lower the price. Weaker companies are bound to come under closer financial scrutiny follwoing events at Enron, WorldCom and Xerox. But as S&P's David Blitzer sagely told the Post: "If the numbers are wrong it doesn't matter how you add them up."