cook the books

Verb

cook the books (third-person singular simple present cooks the books, present participle cooking the books, simple past and past participle cooked the books)

1. (idiomatic) To manipulate accounting information, especially illegally.
   • Enron Corp., once a major U.S. corporation, is now famous for cooking the books.
2. (broadly, idiomatic) To falsify an account of an event.
   • Those that cooked the books and presented them with bias minds; They sugar-coated the stories; and twisted and exaggerated events2012, R.I. Iyemere, The Ordeals: Poems in Memory of Ada-Emilia Valmori, →ISBN, page 146
   • Two years after he received his piece of the Nobel Prize, Mann was drawn into controversy over a series of e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom that some climate change skeptics charged provided proof that Mann and his fellow scientists were cooking the books on...2015, Seamus McGraw, Betting the Farm on a Drought, →ISBN