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You might enjoy a book called Financial Shenanigans (https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Shenanigans-Fourth-Accounti...). It's essentially examples of detective stories based on financial statements.

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I haven’t read the book, but was wondering if you might be able to answer this: is the general theme that companies are able to do this legal thing of changing practices and use it maliciously? And while it might be a well known phenomenon, nobody is actively trying to prohibit it via laws & regulations? the question is serious but also - *Clairvoyance limit test )

look. in india, when someone wants to "inflate sales", they have to pay "indirect tax" or GST on it. at 18%, it gets VERY expensive to do this thing. say you want to double your sales. fine, the government says. just pay full 18% tax on the new 100% sales, which defeats the entire purpose of this. sure, you can increase expenses all you like and the "income tax" law says as long as an expense is actually incurred and is related to business and is not disallowed by law, it is permitted so you can reduce your incometax by any factor but still.

from this year i think, there is something called "expenditure tax" so in case of a p&l statement, if you increase your expenses to reduce NPBT, you pay MORE expenditure tax and vice versa so even this loophole is now effectively closed.

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