The causes and consequences of the long-running inflation of profits by Toshiba reflect some uniquely Japanese cultural norms. So, inevitably, did the 2011 scandal at Olympus, where successive leaders covered up accounting manipulation.
But the genetic traces of those debacles are visible in plenty of other countries and companies. Self-satisfied boards of non-Japanese companies should examine the flaws that are common to all corporate cultures — almost certainly including their own.
After all, there are only so many ways of cooking the books, however varied the details of each case. In the introduction to his indispensable anthology of creative accounting, Michael Jones, a professor of financial reporting, identifies just four main strategies — increasing income, decreasing expenses, increasing assets and decreasing liabilities. Toshiba was doing the first, according to an independent report — but so, for example, was WorldCom, one of the most notorious US cases of accounting fraud, back in the early 2000s.