| There is IRS accounting and GAAP accounting. You try to reduce profit for the former and maximize for the former. Off shoring subsidiary profit shaving is a fairly common practice for IRS accounting. But all the profit stays on the corporate parents books in one way or another (they own the subsidiary). The point isn't to make the executives rich, but to make the shareholders richer by avoiding taxes. Paying people in undervalued stock is common, but "off the books" sounds illegal. I don't know what that means. Also most companies would never sell shares of it's subsidiaries. They like having total control of the subsidiary. Big 4 firms wouldn't fuck over shareholders to get executives rich. Executives are small fish compared to the sorts of institutional investors who own F50 companies. It's the Big 4 instead of the Big 5 because Arther Anderson got caught cooking Enron's books. It destroyed the firm. They aren't going to risk their entire business for some Walmart execs worth a couple million dollars. F50 executives aren't the people who actually own the world. They are people who work for the people who own the world. If the executives are stealing, it's not something that is accepted. If found they'd be totally fucked. |
That's a distinction without a difference, since most of those executives' compensation comes through stocks.