Ron When my ex father-in-law sold his beer company to Heineken in 2002-2003, the CEO and his wife and the CFO flew in for one dinner at his mansion and I was seated to entertain the CFO.
The Worldcom scandal of bookcooking had just hit the news and as I had lost a couple of a hundred Ks, I naturally asked the CFO if one can trust financial statements considering Bernie Ebbers (then CEO) was capitalizing and therefore depreciating expenses over many years to boost earnings. His answer was you can only trust the page numbers in financial statements.