What can be a dubious starter material to students of finance and accounting is ‘Taxmann’s Dictionary’ by Dhruba Duttachowdhury ( >www.taxmann.com ).
Addressed to ‘chartered accountants, company secretaries, cost accountants and corporate professionals,’ the book begins with ‘A, A+, A++’ explained as “the gradation certificates on project rating conferred by the Project Appraiser Board of India. They depend upon multi-dimensional facets of new projects in the fields of communication, agri-business, petrochemicals, electronics…” If you search for “Project Appraiser Board of India” in Google, the only result is from >www.odisha360.com/yellow-pages , about a Bhubaneswar-based entity classified under ‘Society - NGO and Charity.’
Fraud buster
Fraud is so much in the news these days, so if you thumb towards ‘F’ there is the entry for ‘fraud buster.’ It is not the CAG or CVC that finds place in the elaboration but “a kind of computer program used by Microsoft Excel to detect cyber fraud through statistical analysis.” Thankfully Duttachowdhury has given a link to an article of 2003 in >www.aicpa.org , wherefrom you will learn that ‘fraud buster’ is the name given the article’s authors for a Visual Basic Application (VBA) they have developed.
Disappointed that ‘scam’ does not seem to figure among the entries, I move on to ‘signpost’ which is “a post with arms showing the direction of and distances to certain places,” and that makes me desperate enough to look for the missing ‘scarecrow’!
Interestingly, however, what follows the ‘signpost’ is ‘silence as fraud,’ about which the author says, “Mere silence as to facts likely to affect the willingness of a person to enter into a contract is not fraud, unless the circumstances of the case are such that it is the duty of the person keeping silent to speak, or unless his silence is in itself equivalent to speech.” Well, if that make you wonder about the PM’s silence, you may not be alone.
As for the book, it is heavy enough to be kept in impressive shelves that are rarely disturbed.
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