Aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes.

"All in all, the total number of losses generated through these rigged fictitious transactions came to $1.1 billion."

"There were bogus loans, fictitious transactions, and then the billing records turn up in the private residence of the Clintons?"

Those losses were believed to have been concealed with fictitious transactions created by a trader in Baltimore, John Rusnak.

"No fictitious transactions were found, and the company's liquidity is not impacted," Paul A. Allaire, Xerox's chairman, said in a statement.

Instead Ms. Nordberg had become the victim of an elaborate scheme by the seller, whose trustworthiness, it turned out, was based on a record of fictitious transactions.

To explain the mechanics of the interbank market, readers should examine and carefully follow the following sequence of fictitious transactions between banks operating in the London euro-dollar market.

Prosecutors suspect Mugen hid its income by moving funds to a company named MG Estate under machine lease and other fictitious transactions for three years through to December 2000.

British regulators were aware five years ago of an allegation that a Japanese trader who has since been accused of losing $1.8 billion trading copper for the Sumitomo Corporation tried to create fictitious transactions.

The losses that a currency trader at a regional Maryland bank is accused of trying to hide with fictitious transactions had been mounting since 1997, rather than just over the last year, bank executives said today.

The bank had discovered that one of its traders had taken "massive fraudulent directional positions in 2007 and 2008," and that he had concealed them "through a scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions."

Since executives control much of the information available to outside investors they have the ability to fabricate the appearance of success - "aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes" - to increase their compensation.

Further investigation by Wall Street Journal staffer Jesse Eisinger led to the revelation on 8 August 2000 of a major financial scandal involving fictitious transactions in Korea and improper accounting methodologies elsewhere.

But today Mr. Rusnak, a currency trader for Allfirst Financial in Baltimore, is under investigation for circumventing the company's safety controls, running up losses of $750 million and concealing them with fictitious transactions.

Before it stopped commenting, the bank was signaling a growing belief that others inside or outside the bank had helped Mr. Rusnak by circumventing ordinary safeguards, like trade verification, that should have detected any fictitious transactions.

Report Prompted Closing The resulting Price Waterhouse report on June 22, 1991, describing "an enormous and complex web of fictitious transactions" prompted the closing of B.C.C.I. less than two weeks later.

Allied Irish Banks announced an independent investigation into how controls at its American subsidiary, Allfirst, failed to detect losses of $750 million that were believed to have been concealed with fictitious transactions created by the Baltimore-based trader John Rusnak.

Document Led to Bank Seizure The report, which is by B.C.C.I.'s auditors, Price Waterhouse, characterized the long-running scheme as "an enormous and complex web of fictitious transactions in what is probably one of the most complex deceptions in banking history."

The examiners found the deal with Mr. Ward was part of "a series of fictitious transactions" involving Madison insiders that had been intended to inflate the association's profits and skirt rules that limited the amount of assets that can be invested in speculative real estate.

One is a 1986 bill by the Rose firm that, the Republicans say, shows that Mrs. Clinton helped to structure a land deal that Federal examiners later found to have been a "fictitious transaction" intended to evade regulations limiting how much a savings association may invest in speculative real estate.