At a golf society outing I was paired with a chairman of a FTSE 100 company. On the first hole he clearly played six shots, but claimed a five. With 17 holes to go, should I have a) challenged him; b) bitten my tongue and recorded a five on the scorecard; c) walked off the course and so ruined my own round; or d) appealed for a third-party ruling?
You have to allow for the possibility that it was a genuine mistake, don’t you? Maybe people who juggle figures all day long can’t help bringing on to the golf course some elements of the creative accounting that they occasionally need to deploy in their day jobs.
It works this way: when a company’s annual results are so bad that they might frighten the shareholders, the directors often find ways of partially (and legally) camouflaging the mayhem by, for instance, “writing things off” (which is City jargon for “burying your mistakes in a corner where your shareholders will, with luck, forget about them); or by placing things “above the line”, or “below the line”, which always sounds as though they put the figures wherever they might look more aesthetically pleasing, a bit like people adjusting their clothes this way and that in front of a mirror to achieve the best effect possible with the material available.
Perhaps your golf partner was “writing off” that extra stroke of his. Maybe he took an executive decision to transfer that extra stroke to his “offshore” scorecard, so as to remove it from the jurisdiction of the UK golf-scoring authorities. Whatever the reason, challenging him would not have made for a jolly atmosphere for the following 17 holes. Inveterate cheats rarely need their reputation ruining by an outsider: they do it well enough themselves.
What’s your view and do you have a dilemma of your own?
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