Our fearless leaders never got around to fixing what was wrong in the financial industry

"Several other Dow components with pro forma earnings in excess of GAAP mentioned those measures in their compensation discussion, but left it unclear how they affected bonus amounts. Some used non-GAAP measures other than earnings, such as economic profits, to set bonus amounts.

Enron, Worldcom etc...

Same stuff, same relative accounting strategies, different year,

most of the same people

More worrisome, using pro forma to set bonuses provides executives with an incentive to exclude items not because they should, but to hit performance bogeys. That creates a risk that pro forma results say less about a company’s underlying health than about executives desire to get paid more."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ceo-bonuses-how-pro-forma-results-boost-them-1464285447