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Fortune looks at some accounting methods that most top corporations use to "manage earnings," in other words - to inflate their financial results in order to meet Wall Street expectations. The Securities and Exchange Commission declared war on the "accounting hocus-pocus," as making the numbers was becoming a widespread practice amongst publicly-owned companies, the magazine reports. The story raises the question whether the uncannily disciplined growth of American corporations in the last decade was not due to their "cooked books," another term for accounting beyond the rules. Several major accounting fraud investigations in recent years are pointed to as examples of chicanery.

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