Technique of the Week: several for Accounting

[johndallman]

This thread is part of a series where I intend to invent a lot of Techniques, to fill out the support for non-combat skills. There's more about my plans and objectives here.

Since crime tempts people to get good at something quite specific with the aim of making money, I thought about a False Accounting technique. Not knowing much about this, I asked a GURPS player who's also a partner in an accounting firm, and had to scramble to write it all down.

Modern Accounting has a lot of real-life specialisations which seem to map quite well to Optional Specialisations:

(Auditing): Checking an organisation's accounts to see if they're truthful. This is mostly a matter of checking internal consistency, since checking all of the bookkeeping for a large organisation would be ridiculously expensive.

(Bookkeeping): Keeping track of an organisation's transactions. This produces much of the data for more complex uses of Accounting. This is what accounts clerks or accounting technicians use.

(Financial): Providing accounting information to people outside an organisation, such as shareholders and regulators. Usually required by law, and covers the complete organisation.

(Forensic): Figuring out what actually happened when accounts are incomplete or falsified. Specialists in this aren't necessarily skilled auditors.

(Management): Providing accounting information to managers within an organisation to support decision-making. Often done separately for different parts of an organisation.

(Tax Compliance): Making sure an organisation's operations are paying all the correct taxes. This can be surprisingly complicated.

(Tax Planning): Arranging to pay the minimum amount of tax possible.

Techniques: Unless otherwise specified, all of these are Average, default to the optional specialisation and have a maximum of optional specialisation +4.

<Type of business> (Accounting (Bookkeeping)). This lets you buy up the Bookkeeping specialisation for a particular industry or other kind of organisation.

<Individual business> (Accounting (Management)). This lets you buy up the Management specialisation for an individual organisation.

<Type of business> (Accounting (Financial)). This lets you buy up the Financial specialisation for a particular industry or other kind of organisation.

And finally ...

False Accounting (Accounting, or any optional specialisation of the skill) Average, default Accounting or specialisation, cannot exceed default+4.

Keeping a separate set of false books is the most foolproof way of keeping dubious transactions or embezzling out of accounts, but it's a lot of work and can lead to confusion. This technique improves your ability to disguise transactions within otherwise legitimate accounts, and is rolled in a contest with your auditor's skill. It's a technique because it can be applied to any of the specialisations.