Yahoo Reaches Board Deal With Activist Fund

Yahoo said Wednesday it had reached an agreement with activist investor Starboard Value to add four members to its board including the hedge fund’s chief executive.The deal ends months of confrontation between Yahoo and Starboard and, according to The Wall Street Journal, paves the way for a sale...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • April 27, 2016

SEC Cracks Down on Vague Proxy Cards

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has directed companies to avoid using vague language to describe shareholder proposals that management opposes.The agency on Tuesday clarified a rule that requires proxy cards to “clearly and impartially” describe the specific action to be voted upon, s...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 25, 2016

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Activists at the Gate

Activist investors are bigger and hungrier than ever. Here’s how to keep them at bay.

By Edward Teach • March 17, 2016

SEC Gives Boost to Investors in Proxy Battles

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has narrowed the scope of a rule that allows companies to block shareholder proposals from coming to a vote, giving a boost to activist investors in corporate governance battles.Rule 14a-8(i)(9) says a company may exclude a proposal from a proxy ballot ...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 23, 2015

Insiders Profiting During ‘8-K Trading Gap’

A regulatory loophole has created an opportunity for corporate insiders to make “meaningful” profits by trading in a public company’s stock before it discloses a significant event, a new study warns.Researchers at Columbia and Harvard universities analyzed nearly 43,000 insider purchases and sale...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 16, 2015

Caesars Palace Fined $8M Over Compliance ‘Blind Spot’

Caesars Palace has agreed to pay $8 million to settle U.S. Treasury charges it had a “blind spot” in its compliance that created the potential for patrons of its private gaming salons to circumvent anti-money laundering controls.The private salons are reserved for the resort’s wealthiest clients,...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 8, 2015

SEC Looking Into Universal Proxy Ballots

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is working on new rules that could give activist investors an edge in contested board elections.Currently, shareholders who vote by proxy receive two sets of ballots, each featuring a rival slate of board candidates. Only those who physically attend ann...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • June 26, 2015

Risk Managers Seek Simpler Data-Breach Notification

Worried about reputation risks and the fines their companies could be hit with if they fail to properly notify regulators of a data breach, risk managers are pushing a Congressional bill that would streamline the current 47-state notification system under a single federal regulator.The bill, call...

By David Katz • June 3, 2015

SEC’s Proposed Comp Rules Are of Little Use, Attorneys Say

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed new rules for the reporting of executive compensation by public companies, released Wednesday, put some questions on the table. Perhaps none is more to the point than simply: Why?Executive compensation experts who spoke with CFO were critical of t...

By David McCann • April 30, 2015

Quotas Aren’t Best Way to Get Women on Boards: Study

The use of quotas isn’t the most effective way to get more women to participate – and remain — on corporate boards, according to research presented Wednesday at BNY Mellon’s Womenomics conference and reported in The New York Times/Deal Book.More than quotas, greater indicators of women’s particip...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • April 8, 2015

Executives Forced to Own More Company Stock

Bowing to pressure from investors to make top executives more accountable for their performance, large companies are gradually requiring CEOs and CFOs to own more of their employer’s stock.In 2014, among the 90% of Fortune 500 companies that had stock-ownership guidelines, 92% had guidelines for ...

By David McCann • March 19, 2015

Companies Dropping the Ball on Risk, Compliance

Companies are woefully unprepared to deal with the increasingly challenging risk and compliance environment, and the blitz of devastating corporate blunders witnessed in 2014 will recur, and then some, this year, says Forrester Research in a scathing new report.The report cites such corporate fai...

By David McCann • March 4, 2015

Five Tips for Measuring Compliance Success

Whistleblower hotlines are an essential component of any compliance program. They provide an anonymous process for reporting unethical issues and have led to many very high-profile investigations and prosecutions.But when it comes to determining the success of compliance programs, too many compan...

By Lucy Skelton • Nov. 10, 2014

Lack of Integration Hurts Loss Control at Family Enterprises

As advisers to family-controlled operating businesses and private investment offices, we’re likely to encounter every week a new tale of dispute, fraud, theft, litigation and ensuing financial loss among multi-generational businesses.After decades of serving this community, we are no longer surpr...

By Paul McKibbin and Linda Bourn • Oct. 27, 2014

Replacing the Board

Corporate boards are among the most important institutions in capitalism. Their job is to police the relationship between shareholders who own companies and managers who run them. This means keeping an eye out for managerial incompetence and fraud. It also means standing back and offering strateg...

By Economist Staff • Aug. 21, 2014

Ezcorp Shareholder Ousts CEO, Elevates CFO

In the wake of last week’s ouster of its CEO by a top shareholder, pawn-shop operator Ezcorp said Monday that it had installed CFO Mark Kuchenrither as interim chief executive.The announcement was made by the shareholder group MS Pawn Limited Partnership, which owns all of the company’s voting co...

By Iris Dorbian • July 21, 2014

Special Report: Spring Insurance Buying

The phrase “it happens every spring,” which doubles as the title of a 1949 movie about a college professor who discovers a formula that turns him into an overpowering baseball pitcher, evokes the excitement baseball fans feel every year at the onset of this season. For the CFOs and risk managers ...

By David Katz • April 18, 2014

It’s Time for Boards to Have Technology Committees

I’ve had the privilege of serving as a director on several public-company boards for the past 15 years. Audit committees are, of course, very important and we’ve all seen compensation committees grow increasingly important. But no board I’ve heard of has a technology committee. I think it’s time,...

By Timothy Chou • April 15, 2014

B Prepared

Six years ago, Matthew Weatherley-White became convinced that his company should stake a claim to sustainability. “I saw a real opportunity from a market perspective to plant a flag around an issue that I felt was going to become increasingly important,” recalls Weatherley-White, a managing direc...

By Marielle Segarra • March 25, 2014

Five Ways to Manage Supplier Risks

As companies develop business relationships around the world into more complex supply chains, protecting these essential links from disruption is becoming harder to manage.Thus growing number of organizations are developing enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks and other holistic risk manag...

By John Bugalla and Kristina Narvaez • Feb. 25, 2014

Google’s Flaws Start to Show

In its third quarter 2013 financial results, Google reported its eighth consecutive decline in price per click, the money it can charge advertisers. But what’s worrisome is that this eight percent year-over-year loss in pricing power for its core business, a symptom of reputational value loss, is...

By Jonathan Salem Baskin and Nir Kossovsky • Jan. 2, 2014

Risk of Water Scarcity Rising

Multinational companies are feeling the burden of tackling water scarcity, in which a lack of water halts product production, exacerbates other risks and causes revenue shortfalls.In a Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) report, “Moving beyond business as usual,” which presents data on the water-rela...

By Alissa Ponchione • Dec. 18, 2013

Game Theory Sparks Terrorism Risk Modeling

Thirteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one thing has become clear about the challenges of modeling and analyzing terrorism risk: at the core of the peril is the intelligence of an adversary who can decide where and when to strike and have counter-moves for ev...

By David Katz • Dec. 2, 2013

CFO Pay Trends by Industry: Wildly Diverse

BDO, the accounting and advisory firm, recently performed an analysis of CFO vs. CEO pay trends at 600 midsize public companies. It shows that total pay for 2012 — salary, annual bonus and long-term incentives — rose 5 percent for finance chiefs and 6 percent for their bosses, compared with the p...

By David McCann • Oct. 29, 2013

Obstacles to Protecting Data Abound

While the digital landscape continues to evolve, information-security controls are constantly being tested. Generally, an individual’s rights to online privacy are protected by some form of legislation in most countries. As a result, organizations that store and manage an individual’s personal in...

By Rob Livingstone • Oct. 24, 2013