Creative accounting, of course, has a long history of cropping up during a boom, a tradition dating far back to the Gilded Age when inflating assets, understating liabilities, and bribery were commonplace. More recently the dotcom boom and the lead-up to the Great Recession brought to light such practices as “channel stuffing,” “roundtripping revenue,” and who can forget “special purpose entities.” Now industry watchers are starting to raise red flags about ARR. “The problem is that so much of this is essen ...