Grasping most problems requires only a rudimentary understanding of simple bookkeeping rules and their relationship to financial statements. The double entries keep balance sheets equalized and sustain the relationship between net income and owners' equity. These bookkeeping rules are inviolate. So short of making up or not recording transactions, the tricks are played in classifying them as an expense or an asset, or as a liability or a revenue. What eventually is called fraudulent or scandalous, moreover, does not always begin as gaming.
Difficult judgements are often necessary in deciding how or when to account for a transaction.
In making a judgment, though, managers and auditors may be tempted to make the call most favorable to the reporting company, even if it is aggressive. A lawyers aware of special pressures to do so and sufficiently conversant with accounting to understand a judgement's dubiousness can often make the difference between nurturing the roots of an accounting scandal and nipping one in the bud. There are lots of techniques for aggressive accounting and lost of circumstances that call for difficult judgements. Yet many recent accounting scandals have a simple thing in common. Earnings were inflated by treating as an asset what should have been treated as an expense.