Editing Slush fund (section)

{{Short description|Fund used for illegal purposes}}
{{For|the television episode|Slush Fund (The Professionals)}}
{{Political corruption sidebar}}

A '''slush fund''' is a fund or account used for miscellaneous income and expenses, particularly when these are [[Political corruption|corrupt or illegal]].<ref>{{cite web | title=Slush fund | url=http://www.dictionary.com/browse/slush-fund?s=t | website=Dictionary.com Unabridged | access-date=4 Jun 2017}}</ref> Such funds may be kept hidden and maintained separately from money that is used for legitimate purposes. Slush funds may be employed by government or corporate officials in efforts to pay influential people [[wikt:discreet|discreetly]] in return for preferential treatment, advance information (such as [[Insider trading|non-public information]] in financial transactions), and other services.<ref>Law, Jonathan. A Dictionary of Finance and Banking, 5 ed. ed., 2014. http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199664931.001.0001/acref-9780199664931-e-3516</ref> The funds themselves may not be kept secret but the source of the funds or how they were acquired or for what purposes they are used may be hidden. Use of slush funds to influence government activities may be viewed as [[Subversion (political)|subversive]] of the [[democratic process]].

A slush fund can also be a reserve account used to reduce fluctuations in an organization's earnings by withholding them when they are high and supplementing them when they are low. This type of slush fund is not inherently corrupt, but is nonetheless a form of [[earnings management]] that tends to mislead stakeholders about the organization's financial condition.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia|editor-last=Wherry|editor-first=Frederick F.|title=The SAGE Encyclopedia of Economics and Society|date=2015|article=Accounting, Critical}}</ref>