> I'm not very knowledgeable in this, but my understanding is that there are a number of accounting tricks that many different industries can use to disguise pr

> I'm not very knowledgeable in this, but my understanding is that there are a number of accounting tricks that many different industries can use to disguise profits as losses, which feeds directly into corruption. I'm not knowledgeable about this either but I think you're confused. It sounds like you're saying you believe it's easy with "accounting tricks" to flip the sign on net income so that a profit of $X looks like a loss of $X, more so than to make a profit of $X look like a profit of $0 (which is what your proposal incentivizes). I find this very doubtful. There's always incentive to hide profits, because they have to be shared. Then you could imagine an "incentive structure" that pays companies a bonus based on profits. Obviously, that would incentivize exaggerating profits, and people would look for accounting tricks to do that.