Dear Friends,
Survival in the Asian Capital Jungle: Who Knows What When – Remembering Accounting Superhero Abraham Briloff
December is an unrelenting month – December last year took away from the world an accounting superhero, Professor Abraham Briloff. Right up until about a month before his death on Dec 12 at age 96, Abe was unrelenting in alerting Barron’s about some accounting fraud he had uncovered that was hidden in corporate America’s financial statements – a lifelong endeavor he persisted for 45 years since his enlightening “Dirty Pooling” article on July 15, 1968. When financial crisis strikes, Abe’s words become the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Even though Abe was legally blind, he could see clearly the accounting issues, having memorized pages of the company’s financials that had been read to him by his daughter Leonore or his grad students at City University of New York’s Baruch College. When asked about his thought process, the grandmaster said, “It begins with some sensitivity as to where the problem might be. Somehow, there’s a serendipity where I know that there’s an issue out there.” Abe elaborates his Process in a Barron’s interview:
“The numbers reverberate in my mind, and then I turn to Leonore and say, ‘Get for me the data in these areas,’ or ‘Read such-and-such to me from whatever document you might find.’ He records his thoughts on tape, on one of the several recorders that he keeps on the desk in his study, and then he reflects further. When he goes to bed, the numbers still dance in his mind, and he keeps a tape recorder beside his bed. It is as if he can see the numbers, much as Beethoven could hear the melodies even though deaf. As new numbers come in, he incorporates them into his thinking, to confirm or reject his original hypothesis. “Something hits. You say, ‘Why is it there?’ Or something that should be there, isn’t there,” he says. He performs the most critical calculations in his head.”
Abe’s heroic commitment to exposing accounting frauds has been a source of inspiration for us when crafting out Accounting Fraud in Asia, an official course in the Singapore Management University (SMU) degree curriculum that will be launched in January 2015. Continue reading →
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AsianExtractor: Unearthing Accounting Fraud in Asia 