Greenspan at the Helm

The unpredictable and frequently astonishing events of the last several months have forced many people to change plans. Young entrepreneurs anticipating dot-com initial public offerings have had to shelve the blueprints for their mansions. Large companies are shying away from jittery bond markets...

By Daniel Gross • Jan. 1, 2001

Looking for Raw Deals

By the time Elvis had left the building at United Technology Cos. headquarters last winter, it was clear that the Hartford-based company’s new E-procurement system could procure just about anything. The system didn’t actually bring the King back from the grave, but it did manage to engage an Elvi...

By Tim Reason • Jan. 1, 2001

NEW COLUMN: Risks & Benefits

(Editor’s note: This is the first appearance of “Risks & Benefits,” a weekly column covering risk management, employee benefits, compensation, and other workplace issues of interest to senior financial executives. Comments are welcomed. E-Mail to: [email protected].)On the surface, it sounds ...

By David Katz • Dec. 26, 2000

It’s Time to Get Serious About Audit Committees

Leland Graul recalls the time not too long ago when he nearly lost it. The BDO Seidman partner was meeting with chiefs of a Fortune 1000 client in order to review procedures for the firm’s audit.“‘As chairman of the audit committee, do I have to read the Form 10-K?'” he remembers being asked. “I ...

By Ed Zwirn • Dec. 21, 2000

Disclosing Stock-Option Plans

Are companies that issue stock options to a broad base of employees, as well as directors and officers, trying to slip a fast one past investors? Or should company management, operating in a tight labor market, be cut some slack and be permitted to offer stock options to rank-and- file employees ...

By David Katz • Dec. 19, 2000

Ghastly Calculations

Maybe it’s the fear that a car crash or a food contamination, mixed with a class-action lawsuit, can subtract hundreds of millions of dollars from a company’s bottom line. Maybe it’s the cheap price of liability insurance. Whatever the cause, however, corporations have been buying higher and high...

By David Katz • Dec. 14, 2000

It’s the Losses, Stupid

With their companies facing the likely prospect of higher property-casualty insurance costs in 2001, CFOs and the risk managers who toil under them may soon be handling some hot potatoes: potential losses that were previously insured. And those loss exposures— spiked by a random hurricane or a st...

By David Katz • Dec. 12, 2000

Don’t Call Me Dot-Com Anymore

Everyone has a friend that had a silly nickname when they were young, like “Bones” or “Boomer.” It was cool in college, but chances are when those friends graduated, they worked hard to ditch the nickname to appear more professional in the working world. Once- glorious, now scorned Internet compa...

By Lisa Yoon • Dec. 8, 2000

The Power of Purchasing Cards

A few years ago, if Keith Miller told his colleagues at Ericsson (www.ericsson.com) that the company’s transaction processing would soon become paperless, he probably would have been laughed at. The SKr215 billion ($22 billion) Swedish phone giant was no different from other large companies; it w...

By Cliff Saran • Dec. 1, 2000

Law: OSHA Issues Final Ergonomics Regulation, Lawsuits Follow

See all of those people busily typing outside your office? Well, the harder they work, the more it could wind up costing you. Why?On November 14, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) adopted a final ergonomics regulation, which addresses repetitive motion injuries, such as car...

By Jennifer Caplan • Dec. 1, 2000

A Brand New Start of It

When Alan Hevesi was elected Comptroller of New York City in 1994, his office at One Centre Street looked pretty much the way it did when Tammany Hall, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller ruled the town. Little had been refurbished, not everyone had computers, and files were overflowing into the...

By Russ Banham • Dec. 1, 2000

Reg FD and The Big Chill

If you think Reg FD won’t have a chilling effect on the way public companies communicate the details of their inner workings, consider Eric K. Brandt, the 38-year-old CFO and corporate vice president of Allergan, a high- tech health care corporation in Irvine, Calif. He’s only one of six people y...

By David Katz • Nov. 27, 2000

Communications: GE Sheds Light on Warning Rumors

More and more, chat room and E-mail rumors are forcing companies to do something they hate to do—respond. General Electric Co. was forced today to undress rumors that it was planning to issue a profit warning that it would fall short of fourth quarter earnings estimates. “Responding to an outrage...

By Joseph McCafferty • Nov. 22, 2000

Audit Committees Face SEC Heat

Conjure up the stereotype of an outside director and you’re likely to see a former President, senator or other dignitary getting paid to do little more than attend some meetings and lend prestige to a firm. But publicly held U.S. corporations will soon need to pay closer attention to the selectio...

By Ed Zwirn • Nov. 22, 2000

Sidebar: Straight Talk at Ford

Recapitalization plans are not exactly a piece of cake. Difficult to engineer, they’re even more complex to explain to those outside the financial world. So when Ford Motor Co. needed to communicate to its 725,000 shareholders its market recapitalization proposal in its July proxy statement, the ...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 21, 2000

Disclosure: Why Plenty of Companies are Failing English

In 1998, the Securities and Exchange Commission passed a proposal requiring the use of plain English in the filing of prospectuses. The move was an attempt by the SEC to provide greater accessibility to the documents for individual investors. While the directive was largely applauded, some compan...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 21, 2000

Can Comdisco Ventures Escape Incubator Hell?

Sometimes hanging with the wrong crowd can brand you for life. Just don’t tell that to Comdisco Inc., which hopes to convince the investing public that its profitable Ventures business is not an incubator. But the company is going to have to challenge some preconceived notions among investors, wh...

By Craig Schneider • Nov. 20, 2000

Restatement Blues

Here’s another verse of those bad old “restatement blues.” You’re a CFO of a prominent public company that’s materially misstated its earnings and now must issue a restatement. Besides the prospects of a plummeting stock price, possible accounting fraud by your underlings, and suits by angry shar...

By David Katz • Nov. 17, 2000

Fair Warnings

Amid the surge of earnings preannouncements that roiled the stock market in September and early October, most commentators saw signs of an economic slowdown. They were only partly right, because quarterly warnings about corporate profits will be more common now that CFOs risk SEC sanctions if the...

By Stephen Barr • Nov. 1, 2000

Pro Forma Performances

Are GAAP net earnings on the endangered species list? Pro forma per- share figures in earnings announcements, a number derived after removing an expanding list of items and sometimes real cash expenses, seem to be crowding out traditional earnings in many industries. But who can blame the CFO? Th...

By George Donnelly • Nov. 1, 2000

Parrying the Litigation Threat

Samsonite Corp. was struggling with some heavy baggage as it attempted to recapitalize a couple of years ago. The cause of the load: shareholder litigation, filed in the wake of the stock-price free fall from a failed attempt to sell the company. The suits hampered the Denver-based manufacturer’s...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 1, 2000

SIDEBAR: A Flight to Quality?

With the current southward drift of the NASDAQ, might a flight to quality that includes interest in newly seductive insurance stocks be afoot? If that’s true, the higher premiums plaguing CFOs might be recouped by their companies’ investment in insurance stocks.In the last year, p-c stocks have c...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2000

The Feast is Over

After years of serving up banquets of low- priced coverage, the property-casualty insurance business has decided to close the kitchen door and improve its results. CFOs can thus expect to see double-digit premium hikes in many lines of coverage as their organizations negotiate their insurance ren...

By David Katz • Nov. 1, 2000

The Tax Noose Tightens

The coils of COLI are tightening. Past use of highly leveraged, corporate-owned life insurance(COLI), an alluring tax shelter in the early 1990s, is looming as a threat to many prominent corporations in the wake of a federal court ruling that dubbed one such arrangement a “sham” aimed solely at t...

By David Katz • Oct. 23, 2000

Is a Bank Deal in Liberty Mutual’s Future?

Liberty Mutual Group’s management may be playing it a little coy in not revealing any specific plans once its restructuring into a mutual holding company is finished. But the company will at least have the flexibility to make deals outside of insurance. If nothing else, the new structure will mak...

By David Katz • Oct. 13, 2000