cook the books

From the mid-17th century. A metaphor based on cooking, whereby ingredients are changed, altered and improved. Thus financial statements can also be so modified to the benefit of the "cook".

• "Enron Corp., once a major U.S. corporation, is now famous for cooking the books."
• "Those that cooked the books and presented them with bias minds; They sugar-coated the stories; and twisted and exaggerated events"
• "Two years after he received his piece of the Nobel Prize, Mann was drawn into controversy over a series of e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom that some climate change skeptics charged provided proof that Mann and his fellow scientists were cooking the books on climate, though for what reason, the skeptics never made clear."
• "One does suspect that the authors of Numbers cooked the books a bit to make the more important and respected tribes (Judah, for instance) look good with higher population numbers."

• off the books
• creative accounting
• double bookkeeping
• goose is cooked
• Hollywood accounting
• Hollywood bookkeeping
• white-collar crime