Accrual Golfing

[damonshort]

a friend of mine sent me this; not saying whether I necessarily agree with his perspective, only that the (disc) golf connection is amusing....
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Taking my cue from the people in Washington, I have recently developed a improved golf scoring method called  'Off Budget Golfing."

The way it works is pretty straightforward.  Most golfers use the equivalent of 'cash basis accounting'.  These simple golfers start on hole 1 and play through to hole 18. Add up strokes, lowest stroke count wins. Simple, but obviously outdated since it's not the way IRS, the federal government, or real slippery corporations do things.

Accrual Golfing: First, I have an intricate set of rules that allows me to define my "fiscal game".  Usually, that means the scoring on the first three or four holes is associated with a past game.  When someone asks me "What did you shoot last week"  I tell them "Oh, 115..."  I leave out the part about the four shots left to play the coming week.

If that past game happened to be a pretty good one, I use a technique I call 'score averaging.  Done properly, I can usually get a 5-10 stroke credit carryforward, since the results of the previous game are subject to accelerated depreciation.  So automatically, on the 5th hole, I'm usually 4 or 5 under par.

Then I have set up the golf equivalent of Section 179 which allows me to deduct all the strokes on my three worst holes in any fiscal game.  That often gets me up to the tee box on the 8th hole still 4 or 5 under par.  As you can see, this makes me a formidable golfer.

Next, I disallow certain travel expenses, such as off-fairway excursions.  Can't count since it was not even close to business travel, got it? Usually save 10-strokes or so using that one. 

Then, if the ball is struck and disappears, it is assumed to have gone into a special high security hole that no one knows about outside the Senate Golf Committee' staff, so I count only as many strokes as it took to launch the ball into oblivion.

Water traps are treated off budget, too.  If I splash a ball, it's as good as done - and that's my stroke count for the hole.  It just went 'off budget", right?

Even with all my new found sleazy golf accounting tricks, I sometimes find that I'm carding 90 or more by the 17th hole.  In which case, I elect to report my score as an offshore currency equivalent.  If, for example, I move my score to my Cayman Islands golf account, I multiply the US score by 80% to convert it to local scoring.  You have to be careful with this, however, since any score in Cayman Islands golf m put back in am American scoring account has to be multiplied by 1.25, although if you know the right folks in Grand Turk....
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If this sounds like an absolutely crazy way to score golf - you're absolutely right -  it is!

Yet if this is crazy for golf scoring, or we applied such absurdities to other iconic American sports like Baseball of Football, why is it less crazy when we invest absurd abstractions for the 'scoring' of federal, state, local and corporate accounting? 

Didn't the US government itself just announce last year that Lehman and AIG were mulligan's?  And isn't the Fed trying to become course marshals with a hidden rule book that no one ever sees?

And what about GE?  Are we going to spot them one club length inside bounds and play on like nothing's going on?  Citi?  What - 5-yard penalty, replay the down?

Think about it.   What would the world be like with the FASB scoring sports?   I'm not waiting.  I'm going to start creative account in golf immediately.

Hey!  Maybe then I could score one of those green Master's Jackets?  The first one to implement the latest & greatest special accounting rules wins...am I right?

I wonder if hosting president Obama for golf would be tax deductible for a regular human?  I expect it would be for a nonhuman corporate entity....

George Ure
From: http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm