Adjusting the Numbers

 In the chapter "The Army" of The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, W.H. Lewis writes of Louvois's vigorous efforts to suppress a fraud commonly practiced by officers of the army:

.... the most intelligent contented themselves with the profit to be made out of passe volants. Under this system, the captain who was receiving pay for a hundred men, would in fact pay and maintain perhaps sixty, annexing the money of the imaginary forty. Inspections were few and far between, commissioners of war were conveniently blind, and their visits well advertised beforehand; on the day of the muster a collection of valets, grooms, and beggars would be issued with musket and bandolier, and would shuffle along behind the real soldiers. The commissioner would sign the muster roll, the stage soldiers would be dismissed with a pourboire, and the captain could put the whole matter out of his mind for another twelve months...

The military aspect of the passe volant abuse was an even more serious matter than the financial, for it meant that a commander took the field in complete ignorance of the effective strength of his army. To be sure, he had the daily strength returns; but what percentage of the men inscribed thereon really existed? It follows from this state of affairs that we must be very cautious in accepting battle casualty figures in the earlier part of the century; for the captain whose company had a nominal strength of a hundred and an effective strength of seventy would undoubtedly, if he could manage to get his men under fire at all, report that he had lost thirty men in action when perhaps he had had no losses at all.

Near the end of The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom,  Don Worcester describes accounting as it was managed in the Montana of the 1880s:

Northern ranch managers consistently wrote optimistic reports to stockholders or owners, playing down winter losses at "probably one or two percent." Experienced cowmen in Montana considered 10 percent a normal annual mortality. After herds purchased on the tally book counts had been ranged in the North four or five years, owners were beginning to inquire why beef shipments were not larger.

The severe winter of 1886-1887 helped to resolve the accounting:

There is, however, another side to the Big Die-up, as Colonel Samuel Gordon of the Yellowstone Journal pointed out many years later. "It is comforting," he wrote, "to reflect on the number of reputations that were saved by the 'hard winter' of 1886-87. It was a hard winter--the latter end of it--and the worst of it came when the cattle were weak and thin and unable to stand grief, but it never killed half the cattle that were charged to it. It came as a God-sent deliverance to the managers who had for four or five years past been reporting 'One percent losses,' and they seized the opportunity bravely, and comprehensively charged off in one lump the accumulated mortality of four or five years. Sixty percent loss was the popular estimate. Some had to run it up higher to get even, and it is told of one truthful manager in an adjoining county that he reported a loss of 125%, 50% steers and 75% cows. The actual loss in cattle was probably thirty to fifty percent, according to localities and conditions."