But instead the Bush administration has turned to the political equivalent of another increasingly common accounting trick: the "one-time charge."

We truly delivered £3bn of synergies, it was not just an accounting trick.

This is nothing more than an accounting trick.

We must also eliminate all the Government's accounting tricks.

Your figure of 53% is based on an accounting trick.

"One of the things I resolved is that we would balance the budget in the first year, without any accounting tricks," he said.

At the end of the year, he said, they hid the fraud from auditors using accounting tricks.

And, I must confess, he fights honorably now, with open force rather than devious accounting tricks.

They're just as likely to indicate a corporate management that is more adept at fancy accounting tricks than at running a business.

This is not budgetary efficiency; it is quite simply an accounting trick.