Accounting bears the same relationship to actually running a business that the Efficient Market Hypothesis does to actually effectively investing -- which is to say, almost nothing.
These statements require thought or liability to potential jail time. In addition, the impact of these statements on financial markets (ie: stock price) is tremendous. Management damn well should be thinking about shareholder value.
Are there any examples of this? It seems to me the SEC didn't make much use of all the archived emails (guaranteed to be in place due to SOX) during the 2008 banking crisis which makes me generally distrustful of these formal written rules.
http://www.accounting-degree.org/scandals/
They misstated costs as investments and were able to show big profits - for a while.
Not true at all. Well run companies do spend a lot of time in preparing their financial statements. First, it is required by law, see - Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, etc.
Second, it can get well-run companies with good intentions into a lot of trouble with the SEC and investor lobbying groups.