Accounting scandals, or corporate accounting scandals are political and business scandals which arise with the disclosure of misdeeds by trusted executives of large public corporations. Such misdeeds typically involve complex methods for misusing or misdirecting funds, overstating revenues, understating expenses, overstating the value of corporate assets or underreporting the existence of liabilities, sometimes with the cooperation of officials in other corporations or affiliates.

In public companies, this type of "creative accounting" can amount to fraud and investigations are typically launched by government oversight agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States.

In 2002, a wave of separate but often related accounting scandals became known to the public in the U.S. All of the leading public accounting firms—Arthur Andersen, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst & Young, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers— and others have admitted to or have been charged with negligence in the execution of their duty^{[citation needed]} as auditors to identify and prevent the publication of falsified financial reports by their corporate clients which had the effect of giving a misleading impression of their client companies" financial status.^{[citation needed]} In several cases, the monetary amounts of the fraud involved are in the billions of USD.

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//]]>  List of companies involved in scandals

 Big Four major audit firms

(Audit firms are listed, followed by select clients ensnarled by accounting scandals)

• Deloitte & Touche: Adelphia, AES, Duke Energy, El Paso, Merrill Lynch, Reliant Energy, Rite Aid, Parmalat
• Ernst & Young: AOL Time Warner, Dollar General, PNC Bank, Cendant, HealthSouth
• KPMG: Citigroup, Computer Associates, ImClone, Peregrine, Xerox, Siemens AG, Banco Nacional S.A. (Brazil)
• PricewaterhouseCoopers: Bristol Myers, HPL, JP Morgan Chase, Kmart, Lucent, MicroStrategy, Network Associates, NKFS, Tyco