What is "cooking the books"

Usage examples of "cooking the books".

He wagged his neatly trimmed muttonchops, managing to look like an accountant who had discovered that a valued client was cooking the books.

Illiterate punks defacing public property with spray-painted graffiti, suicide bombers, semicoherent pop stars selling rage and nihilism set to an infectious beat, attorneys specializing in tort law and filing massive class-action suits with the express intention of destroying major corporations and age-old institutions, serial killers, drug dealers, crooked cops, corrupted corporate executives cooking the books and stealing from pension funds, faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous others, working at different levels, some as destructive as runaway freight trains hurtling off the tracks, others quietly chewing like termites at the fabric of civility and reason, were necessary to cause the current order to collapse into ruin.

He had been cooking the books for years and he was going to embezzle the money from his company.

He made his biggest mistake when he and his accountant began cooking the books—.

I couldn't imagine what that awful Malcolm Stainley had done, unless he had been cooking the books, God forbid.