A little over a year ago Duke Energy declared it had finished its "best year ever," despite Enron's collapse and the other problems afflicting the energy business at the time. It reported revenue of $60 billion, by that measure making it the 13th-largest U.S. corporation. But the "best year ever" didn't look so great the following June, when a task force at the Financial Accounting Standards Board reached a new consensus on how to account for energy trading. Reversing a position taken in 1998, it decreed that energy trades should be recorded on a net, not a gross, basis. In other words, if a company trades an energy futures contract for $100,000 and makes a $2,000 spread on the trade, it should recognize as revenue only the $2,000.
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