For the story I'm writing, the first plot point is about the merger of two large companies which together will form the largest conglomerate on the planet. My MC is a Finance/Accounting Director at one of the companies tasked with performing due dilligence on the other companies' books. The story will not mainly be about this merger, but the MC will uncover an anomaly in the books that will send him down a rabbit hole, so to speak. If a company were to try to hide certain investing activity from financial statements / cashflow statements / balance sheet (etc.), would the following scenario be plausible? “… there is a disconnect between what I’m seeing on the financial statement, balance sheet and cashflow statement of the Security Services Group. There is a year over year increase of $223M in All Other Investing Activities on the cashflow statement but this $223M does not appear as an expense on the financial statement or as an asset somewhere on the balance sheet. I also don’t see it appearing as an investment in any of the other business unites of the company. This does not make sense… how can $223M just disappear like that?” My accounting is a bit rusty so would appreciate anyone willing to sanity check this for me.
Alright, I already figured out that this does not make sense after doing some more research on my own. I've decided to go with a different approach. No need to respond to this anymore. Mods, feel free to delete this thread if you want. No need to clutter the forum otherwise.
