It's likely because he'd have to retroactively go back into the current system and rewrite the entire code for how the leaderboard system works - that in of itself could provide ample opportunity to bug the entire game in ways he wouldn't intend to.
However, when (almost from scratch) writing a new game, and depending on where and what servers the information is stored on, it shouldn't (theoretically) take more than a simple recall of information from the servers to obtain a player's [insert whichever stat here], compare it to the array of all stored information (herein lies a problem - the amount of information for a simple flash game could be an issue depending on how much information is stored and for how long), and then spit out a list of them in order, or simply give a player their number in the array. It's how most MMORPG's would create their high score lists, etc.
For example, a very basic return of the function in java could be the following (after the information has been sorted and stored in a temporary variable, obviously):
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system.out.println("You are ranked" + rank1 + "in" + reqStat);
And that provides another problem - creating too many temporary variables. There'd have to be another whole section of code dedicated to killing/deleting/recycling the variables in order to minimize the impact it has on running the game smoothly.
So while it would provide ample opportunity to cause problems, it's not *entirely* impossible.