I'm an accounting student in my fourth year, so I thought I could lend some of my insight as to why I think this is a bad article. The tl;dr of it is that this

I'm an accounting student in my fourth year, so I thought I could lend some of my insight as to why I think this is a bad article. The tl;dr of it is that this article contains almost no content other than a lament that financial statements are "fantasy" without ever explaining what she means by that. First, all publicly traded companies are legally required to disclose financial statements that have been prepared according to GAAP and audited by an outside firm who ensures the financial statements are a "faithful representation" of the firm's financial position. Companies are also legally prohibited from suggesting that GAAP numbers are somehow insufficient or don't count in their official financial statements. This system is not perfect - Arthur Anderson had certified Enron's financials and it is known that the need to get continued business as well as form relationships with the companies' can mean that they don't always get the level of pushback that they should from audit firms. Additionally, traditional audit methods aren't really meant to detect outright fraud. The claim that 90% of financial statements were prepared under some method other than GAAP is absurd and the link the author provides does not actually lead to an analysis for that number. Accountants prepare financial statements for the benefit of investors and the rules and principles that form GAAP take into account people's willingness to abuse them, selectively apply them, and otherwise subvert them. There's also a great deal of genuine ambiguity where two reasonable people can look at the same situation and disagree as to the proper accounting treatment. None the less, any investor who would ignore those numbers in favor of some fictitious, back-of-the-envelope calculation in the Management Discussion & Analysis is a fool. However, GAAP also requires that you discuss your company's financial situation, your strategy, your risks and special considerations beyond what is just in the book-keeping calculations. A typical financial statement has more notes and text to it than it does actual tables of accounts and balances. This is necessary because whereas accountants prepare their financial statements for the benefit of outside investors, we try to be as objective as we can and let the debt and equity holders be the ones to actually assess and estimate the meaning behind those numbers according to their own economic theories and financial needs. So what exactly is the problem then? The author briefly gives three reasons that financial statements may not be as faithful as we'd like, but describes none of them in detail: restructuring and acquisition costs, stock-based compensation and write-downs of impaired assets. First is the most obvious one, a write down of an asset due to impairment is an expense. As for executive compensation, that used to be a bigger problem than it was, but the accounting rules were changed to address that and we've seen a massive decrease in fishy compensation deals. There could well be issues about compensation that are emerging, but I don't happen to know about them and the author doesn't bother to mention them. Finally, there's restructuring and acquisition costs. Thankfully, this portion does get a one or two line explanation, but I don't see what this has to do with "hidden expense." The author says that future costs of restructuring are not recorded in the balance sheet. If you did, then you'd record the future cost as a liability and you'd match the expense with the actual work of restructuring. The expense would be the same in either case, but you'd have a liability on your books earlier. Except that you're not actually obligated to continue to spend money on restructuring, so there's no reason to accrue that cost anyway. This is a perfect use-case for a note, with an estimate about how much the company is planning on spending (given the article, the author would probably lament it as a non-GAAP fantasy number anyway). The way accounting is done is not without it's problems, but the author doesn't seem to have anything intelligent to say about those problems.