SEC Probing Pension Consultants

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into possible illegal payoffs in the pension business. The regulator has found indications that money-management firms paid retirement-plan consultants in order to be recommended to the consultants’ clients, according to the The Wall Street Journa...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 26, 2004

Judge Orders $63 Million Conseco Payback

A judge has ordered former Conseco Inc. chief executive Steve Hilbert and his family trusts to return $62.7 million plus interest to Conseco Services, a Conseco subsidiary, according to the Associated Press. Last year, the company filed lawsuits seeking to recover a total of $670 million in stock...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 25, 2004

SEC Seen Probing Pension Costs

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into the accounting practices six companies’ use in calculating pension and other post-retirement benefit costs, according to published reports.Last week, Boeing, Ford, General Motors, Navistar, Northwest Airlines, and Delphi reportedly admitted t...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 25, 2004

Creating a CFO Role from Scratch

D’Anne Hurd has built her career on setting precedents. At every company where she’s been the chief financial officer, she’s been the first person to hold that title, yet Hurd has never used job postings or a recruiter to land those positions.Instead, she identified companies she wanted to work f...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 22, 2004

CFOs on the Move

• Ford Motor Co. assistant treasurer Ann Marie Petach, who has been with the company for 20 years, was promoted to vice president and treasurer. She replaces and will report to Malcolm (Mac) Macdonald, who was named vice president of finance. Macdonald will continue to report to Ford chief financ...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 22, 2004

Prospecting for Your Next Job

D’Anne Hurd has built her career on setting precedents. At every company where she’s been the chief financial officer, she’s been the first person to hold that title, yet Hurd has never used job postings or a recruiter to land those positions. Instead, she identified companies she wanted to work ...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 22, 2004

Oil Man

Oil. This year it has truly meant black gold for both producers and refiners of crude. With prices nearing $50 a barrel over the summer, the industry has reaped the benefits of record high profits — and taken lots of criticism for the same.Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., which in 20...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Oct. 22, 2004

SEC Eyes Pension Accounting, Say Reports

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating how a number of companies calculated assumptions for their post-retirement benefits to determine whether they manipulated the bottom line, according to BusinessWeek.The magazine reported that the commission has identified a few dozen compani...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 19, 2004

Managed-Care Outfits Merge, Again

Corporate health-care costs may once again climb to new heights as managed-care industry consolidation continues.On Thursday, officials at Coventry Health Care Inc. said they agreed to buy First Health Group Corp. for $1.8 billion in stock and cash. Coventry currently has members throughout the m...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 15, 2004

CFOs on the Move

• Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar Inc. announced that vice president and chief financial officer F. Lynn McPheeters will retire February 1, after 40 years with the engine and heavy equipment maker. Corporate controller David B. Burritt will succeed McPheeters as vice president and CFO and head...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 15, 2004

In the Journals: Don’t Always Play Hardball

Congratulations: You’ve negotiated the deal of the century. But if you bargained too hard, don’t expect the other party to do you any favors in the future. That commonsense understanding, which many senior finance executives may appreciate intuitively, now has the support of research by Hannah Ri...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 15, 2004

Wal-Mart Wants to Skip This Class

Wal-Mart may be facing the largest class-action lawsuit ever filed against a private employer in the United States. Or it may not. The class action, involving up to 1.6 million women charging sexual discrimination, was certified in June. But a 1998 change to the rules of civil procedure allows de...

By Joseph McCafferty • Oct. 15, 2004

401(k) Enrollment Declined in 2003

Despite a turnaround by the stock market after several years of losses, employees seem to be cooling toward 401(k) retirement plans.Last year, 76 percent of eligible employees participated in their 401(k) plans, down from 80 percent the year before, according to an annual survey by the Profit Sha...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 12, 2004

Productivity Starts on Day One

While the term on-boarding is fairly new, the process isn’t. Indeed, all companies have policies and procedures in place to help get a new hire up to speed. Increasingly, though, many of those procedures are being handled electronically.The appeal of on-boarding software is obvious. “In the past,...

By Karen Bannan • Oct. 12, 2004

Getting On Board

Sean Huurman is not necessarily known as an environmentalist, but he knows how to save a few trees.In June 2002, Huurman, a managing director at business-consulting firm BearingPoint, was trying to figure out how to carry out a difficult directive from his boss. The task: to swiftly prepare and t...

By Karen Bannan • Oct. 12, 2004

CFOs on the Move

• Enron Corp.’s Raymond Brown resigned as chief financial officer to pursue other job opportunities. Robert Bingham, who will step in as interim CFO and interim treasurer, has since 1999 been an employee of Kroll Zolfo Cooper, a consulting and crisis management firm led by Enron’s interim chief e...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 8, 2004

Health-care Forecast: 8 Percent Hike

Finally, there’s some good news on the health-care front. On average, employers need to budget for a cost increase of just 8 percent in 2005, according to a new survey from Towers Perrin.That would mark the first single-digit bump after four years of increases in the double digits. Employers are ...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 7, 2004

IBM Pays Out in Cash-Balance Case

IBM will pay out $320 million to settle part of a class-action lawsuit relating to its pension plan. The settlement does not, however, address the critical issue of whether the company’s controversial cash-balance pension fund discriminates against older workers. The U.S Seventh Circuit Court of ...

By Stephen Taub • Oct. 1, 2004

CFOs on the Move

• Two of Citigroup Inc.’s top executives are trading jobs. Todd Thomson, currently CFO and head of strategy, will be appointed chairman and chief executive officer of Smith Barney, Citi’s private-client wealth management and equity research unit. Meanwhile Sallie Krawcheck, current chair and CEO ...

By Lisa Yoon • Oct. 1, 2004

The CFO and the Sea

Joe Harris, CFO of New Boston Fund Inc., a Boston-based real estate investment company, isn’t your average weekend sailor. Last spring, Harris finished second in the 50-foot monohull class of the Transat, a solo transatlantic sailing race from Plymouth, England, to Boston. Setting out in the teet...

By Kate O'Sullivan • Oct. 1, 2004

Changing Fortunes: The 2004 Compensation Survey

See the 2004 Compensation Survey TablesThe endgame in the decade-long debate over stock options is finally playing out. The Financial Accounting Standards Board has an expensing requirement ready to go, although it may delay implementation. The International Accounting Standards Board’s standard ...

By Tim Reason • Oct. 1, 2004

Airlines Wage Pay-Cut War

Airlines are famous for cutting and raising fares immediately after their competitors take such actions. Now, it seems, they’re applying the same strategy to cost reductions. On Tuesday, Delta Air Lines Inc. instituted an across-the-board pay reduction of 10 percent for executives, supervisory an...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 30, 2004

Citigroup Moves Krawcheck to CFO

Citigroup stunned observers Monday when it named Sallie Krawcheck CFO and head of strategy. As of November 5, she will replace Todd Thomson, who will step into Krawcheck’s current slot as head of Smith Barney.Krawcheck’s promotion makes her “the highest-ranking female executive on Wall Street,” ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 29, 2004

Revenge of the Nerds’ Bosses

According to sources, God never intended for Java programmers to pull down six-figure incomes. But in the late 1990s, that’s just what happened. Panicked by a shortage of skilled IT workers — a shortage mostly caused by the dot-com boom — employers practically gave away the house in pursuit of te...

By Karen Bannan • Sept. 29, 2004

GE Settles with SEC over Welch’s Perks

Remember all of the exotic benefits former General Electric chairman and CEO Jack Welch was to receive when he retired? Well, the Securities and Exchange Commission wasn’t too happy to learn about them for the first time from sources other than securities filings.As a result, the regulator swung ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 27, 2004