By re-characterizing the Repo 105 dealing as a sale, Lehman detached the account from its balance sheet (Durden, 2010). Lehman frequently augmented its utilization of Repo 105 transactions in the time previous to reporting interludes to decrease its openly reported net leverage and balance sheet. Lehman's intermittent reports did not reveal the money borrowing from the Repo 105 transaction, even though Lehman had in reality borrowed tens of billions of dollars in these dealings, Lehman did not reveal the acknowledged responsibility to pay back the liabilities. Lehman utilized the money from the Repo 105 dealings to pay off other dangers, thus dropping both the entire debts and the entire assets accounted for on its balance sheet and decreasing its power percentages. Therefore, Lehman's Repo 105 dealing was made up of a two-fold procedure: performing Repo 105 dealings followed by the utilization of Repo 105 cash borrowings to pay down debts, thus decreasing power (Durden, 2010).

Lehman never openly revealed its utilization of Repo 105 dealings, its bookkeeping conduct for these dealings, the substantial growth of its overall Repo 105 utilization in late 2007 and into 2008, or the substance force these dealings had on the organization's openly accounted for net power percentage. A careful evaluation of Lehman's financial records would not disclose Lehman's utilization of Repo 105 dealings. Lehman fell short to reveal its Repo 105 practice. In addition to its substance oversights, Lehman positively distorted in its financial statements that the company saw all repo dealings as financing business, not sales for financial treatment reasons (Durden, 2010).

In the beginning it was disputed that Lehman's bookkeeping behavior of the Repo 105 dealing obeyed the then-present Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. It...

Throughout 2007 and 2008, when the Repo 105 dealing took place, organizations were not mandated to make any precise revelations about repo dealings accounted for as sales. Even if Lehman's use of Repo 105 dealings in principle obeyed with [FAS] 140, financial statements may be substantially deceptive even when they do not defy GAAP. There is no realistic or lawful foundation for an allegation to be brought against an auditor in this background where the accounting for the fundamental deal is in agreement with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (Jones, 2010).
It is obvious that Lehman Brothers did not operate in an ethical way but technically they did not violate the GAAP at the time. This is unfortunately the way that a lot of rules end up being changed. They are put into place on way and then when they are utilized in a way that does not appear to be right then the rules are later changed in order to make such action wrong.