What is Accounts Manipulation? Difference between financial fraud and creative accounting explained.

Without a doubt, everyone has heard of accounting and its responsibilities in financial reporting. But not many have come across a creative variation of it and understand its meaning. While there is no single and correct definition, there many explanations that help grasp the meaning behind it. A review paper by Brijesh Yadav (2013) puts it this way:
Creative accounting refers to the use of accounting knowledge to influence the reported figures, while remaining within the jurisdiction of accounting rules and laws, so that instead of showing the actual performance or position of the company, they reflect what the management wants to tell the stakeholders (p. 181).
Yet another compelling explanation for how the whole financial world is based around schemes and cons comes from Ian Griffiths (1986), who writes:
Every company in the country is fiddling its profits. Every set of published accounts is based on books which have been gently cooked or completely roasted. The figures which are fed twice a year to the investing public have all been changed in order to protect the guilty. It is the biggest con trick since the Trojan horse. . . In fact this deception is all in perfectly good taste. It is totally legitimate. It is creative accounting. (p. 1)