My accountant Vinnie the Number Cruncher was beside himself.

"You're a writer," said the gray-haired accountant, "how the hell could you overstate your earnings three years in a row?"

"Everyone else was doing it," I said.

"Kid, you're going to have to explain."

"Vinnie, when I moved to Washington D.C. three and one-half years ago, I wanted to fit in."

"Fit in?"

"Yeah, Vinnie. In Northern Virginia there were paper millionaires all over the place. These fellows had been geeks in high school, but guess who was getting the babes during the Internet boom?"

"You're killing me, kid. Go on."

"I figured that since none of those Internet companies were actually making money - in fact they were gushing red ink - and since big corporations were pretending to make more than they actually were, then why not me?"

"So you hatched a scheme to overstate your own earnings?"

"Yeah, it was easy," I said. "Like WorldCom, the first thing I did was to shift my business expenses into the future. That automatically turned my revenue into 'profit.'"

"Unbelievable, kid."

"And the more income I appeared to make, the more willing banks were to loan me dough. You wouldn't believe the offers I had to borrow money."

"So you borrowed the money, kid?"

"Lots and lots of it, Vinnie. And every time I got a cash advance from a credit card company I declared that money as -"

"Income?"

"Yep. I learned that trick from Xerox. Every time they signed a multi-year lease on a copier, they declared the entire contract's value as income for the first year."

"Very clever, you moron," said Vinnie.

"Well, it wasn't long before my perceived income was looking good. That's when I got the mansion, the foreign cars and the yacht."

"You bought a yacht!" said Vinnie.

"Bought is such a confining word, Vinnie. Let's just say I appeared to own a big boat."

"Kid, your monthly bills had to be astronomical. How in the hell did you pay them?"

"That was easy, Vinnie. See, when credit card A was due, I'd get an advance from credit card B and pay it. Then when credit card B was due, I'd get an advance from credit card A. I think I learned the 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' trick from Enron."

"Kid, sooner or later people would have caught on to your scheme. How did you conceal it from your creditors and the IRS?"

"That was easy, too, Vinnie. I established complicated partnerships and exotic hedging techniques. I had things so convoluted a busload of Harvard CPA's couldn't have unraveled it."

"You learn how to do that in accounting class?"

"No, I learned it in a creative writing class."

"Kid, you realize how much damage you've done?"

"But it was so tempting, Vinnie. Everyone was doing it!"

"But kid, it's because of people like you - because of moronic executives like you - that things are in a mess. The dollar is falling. Stocks are in the toilet. Foreigners are pulling their cash out of America faster than you can say 'immigration!' And lots of innocent people have seen their stock value crash. Your actions are damaging our ability to recover from the recession."

"I'm sorry, Vinnie."

"You fell into the same trap that too many people did, kid. For too long the economy and stock market went up, up, up. Businessmen got lazy, greedy, stupid and bold. This seems to happen every decade in this country. And all of you built a house of cards that has fallen in on all of us."

"How do we get out of this mess, Vinnie?"

"Kid, it's real simple. When a football team falters, the coach makes them get back to the basic principles: basic blocking, basic tackling. Everyone in this country needs to do the same."

"What do you mean, Vinnie?"

"Businessmen must be stopped from using tricky schemes to boost the short-term paper value of their stocks - and stop padding their own obscene earnings in the process. They got to think of profit, stability, the long term. And maybe Congress will have to refine the rules to make sure they do."

"What about me?"

"You got yourself into a pile of debt that you're going to have to pay off."

"How am I going to do pay off millions on a writer's salary?"

"Why don't you follow in the footsteps of all those former Internet millionaires you tried to emulate?" said Vinnie. "I hear they're looking for night shift managers at the 7-11."  

Tom Purcell