As investors worry about their ability to trust many companies' income statements, the Worldcomm example shows how the single earning figure at the bottom of an income statement is built on an array of management choices and estimates that can be tweaked to produce different results. Regulators and accounting sleuths long have known that managers willing to manipulate results often focus on 'accounts receivables'.

According to Professor Chuck Mulford, an Accounting Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, by merely tweaking the assumption about how many such receivables are uncollectible in a company whose total accounts receivables peaked to $ 3.8 billion in year 2000, from $ 1.2 billion in 1997, Worldcomm could produce a significant change in earnings from one quarter to the other and from one year to the next. Some analysts think that there is a huge receivables risk with a customer base as in Worldcomm. The company's new economy customer base also made it difficult to compare Worlcomm's numbers with those of rivals such as AT & T Corporation, which had larger and more traditional businesses as its customer base. IN September 2000, a large part of the receivables were written off under instruction from the head office, but as the accounts were in shambles, the collection department came up with arbitrary numbers for write off.

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