Innocents Abroad

Nearly 35 years after China reestablished trade with the United States, launching a foreign subsidiary there remains difficult — especially for a smaller company. Managers must come up with a business plan, translate it into Mandarin, then submit it along with a two-inch pile of forms. That’s whe...

By Don Durfee • June 1, 2006

Core Inflation Hits 13-month High

Is inflation actually higher than the pundits have maintained?The latest worrisome data, for corporations and other economy-watchers, was Friday’s announcement by the Department of Commerce that core inflation rose 2.1 percent in April, compared with April 2005.This was the fastest increase in co...

By Stephen Taub • May 26, 2006

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

Can SOX 404 Be Measured?

Speakers at the May 10 Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 roundtable, co-hosted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, listed a host of numbers to prove their particular point of view about the impact of the internal controls provision on companies an...

By Helen Shaw • May 16, 2006

Creation Nets: Getting the Most from Open Innovation

Thanks to the many books on “open innovation” and to the prominence of open-source software projects such as Linux, most executives have at least a passing familiarity with the subject. Its central idea is that when companies look outside their own boundaries, they can gain better access to ideas...

By The McKinsey Quarterly • May 16, 2006

Ex-CFO of Parmalat Blames the Boss

Fausto Tonna, once the chief financial officer of Parmalat Finanziaria SpA, testified Tuesday that former chief executive officer Calisto Tanzi explicitly told other executives to fudge financial reports to mask losses at the food and dairy giant in 1994, the Associated Press reported.“The fact o...

By Stephen Taub • May 9, 2006

Spitzer Turns Up the Heat on H&R Block

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed an amended lawsuit against tax preparer H&R Block, citing additional evidence of fraudulent marketing of individual retirement accounts and alleging that the company penalized employees who wouldn’t play along.“In addition to designing a fla...

By Stephen Taub • May 8, 2006

Easy Target?

Success has its side effects. One is that it puts you directly in what money professionals call the “seller hit zone.” That’s the place where executives become a target for anyone with a slick sales pitch and an investment opportunity that is supposedly “necessary” for building and protecting wea...

By Chuck Jaffe • May 8, 2006

View from Europe

When Fulvio Conti was promoted from CFO to CEO at Italian utility Enel last year, it was widely assumed that he would immediately use the company’s €15 billion war chest to make some long-anticipated cross-border acquisitions. Like many other European companies, Enel has few growth opportunities ...

By Janet Kersnar • May 8, 2006

Talking Points

Of all the functions under the corporate roof, employee communications is the one that most managers pay lip service to. It’s not that they regard it as unimportant. Executives acknowledge that when it comes to effecting major change — a shift in strategy, or a merger, or a restructuring — employ...

By Edward Teach • May 8, 2006

Small-business Shake-up

Hector Barreto, the head of the federal Small Business Administration, is leaving his position to take the helm of the Latino Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy group.To succeed him, President Bush nominated Steven Preston, an executive vice president for ServiceMaster, a nationwide network o...

By Stephen Taub • April 26, 2006

Trimming Hemlines and Deadlines

In the late 1990s, managers of clothing boutiques began freshening up the inventory in their stores every few weeks. The accelerated turnover—quite hefty compared to the industry standard of three to four times a year—spurred them to place increased importance on metrics that could help them prod...

By Helen Shaw • April 24, 2006

At Wendy’s, Where’s the Chief?

In a surprise, Wendy’s International announced that Jack Schuessler will step down as chairman and chief executive officer after more than 30 years with the fast-food purveyor.Chief financial officer Kerrii Anderson will step in as interim chief executive officer and president; long-time board me...

By Stephen Taub • April 18, 2006

A Final Cry for Relief

Will small companies catch a break on Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements? One way or another, they’ll find out soon.On Wednesday, April 12, the SEC Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies will hold its last public teleconference to discuss whether the requirements of Section 404 of Sarb...

By Helen Shaw • April 10, 2006

Restatements Deliver Fuel for Reform

Providing support for arguments against regulatory breaks for small caps, Richardson Electronics and Hemispherx Biopharma announced restatements stemming from accounting errors and saw their share prices dive.Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox said earlier this week that ...

By Stephen Taub • April 5, 2006

View from Asia

General Electric Corp. has done well in India: in 2004 it sold a majority stake in its pioneering business-process-outsourcing subsidiary for almost half a billion dollars. Yet GE’s CFO, Keith Sherin, told CFO Asia late last year that he finds India frustrating. “You get excited and nothing happe...

By Tom Leander • April 1, 2006

As the Cycle Turns

Anxiety rippled through Corporate America last February when the U.S. Department of Commerce issued its latest report card on the economy — a mere 1.6 percent GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2005. That was the slowest growth in three years. But economists generally remained optimistic, predi...

By Edward Teach • April 1, 2006

Business Outlook Survey

After several quarters of gloom, finance executives are starting to see some bright spots. According to the latest Duke University/CFO Business Outlook Survey, 42 percent of CFOs are becoming more optimistic about the direction of the U.S. economy, up from 32 percent last quarter. That marks the ...

By Joseph McCafferty • April 1, 2006

Capitol Hill Tackles Complexity

What would make financial reporting simpler? A host of regulators, business groups, and investor advisory firms converged on Capitol Hill yesterday to debate that question. The hearings are the latest in what appears to be an organized push — led by the Financial Accounting Standards Board — to t...

By Tim Reason • March 30, 2006

How Green Was My Balance Sheet?

Calling them tree-huggers wouldn’t be wrong. In fact, the Wall Street Journal called the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) “the most effective environmental agitators in the business.” And the group’s mission is to save trees by halting destructive deforestation and its attendant climate-change and...

By Marie Leone • March 23, 2006

Putting People First

Performance management is one of the hottest topics among senior finance executives and the analysts and vendors who serve them. Simply put, it’s a set of processes, metrics, methodologies, and software tools that allow an organization to forecast, measure, and react to various business drivers a...

By 10Rule • March 20, 2006

UPS Warns of Bribery Violations

United Parcel Service Inc. is the latest company to run afoul of a U.S. law prohibiting bribery overseas, announcing that it is investigating possible violations within its Supply Chain Solutions subsidiary.In a regulatory filing, the Atlanta-based shipping company disclosed that the possible vio...

By Stephen Taub • March 15, 2006

View from China: Stakeholder Capitalism

Karan Bhatia, the deputy U.S. trade representative, urged China in late January to become a “responsible stakeholder” in its trading relationships with the United States. Here in Shanghai, her remarks created a frenzy as people strove in vain to find a translation for the word stakeholder. That’s...

By Wu Chen • March 15, 2006

The Best Advice

You wouldn’t hire the next guy who walks in your office and can talk business to be your company treasurer. If you did, you might wind up with a delivery boy instead of an executive.Likewise, you almost certainly didn’t get your job without competition, a rigorous screening process, and probing i...

By Chuck Jaffe • March 15, 2006

Days of Delinquency

The metric known as “days sales outstanding” (DSO), a gauge of credit-collection efficiency, is at a 10-year low for U.S. corporations—and that’s good news. To many, a low DSO means that a company is collecting its outstanding receivables quickly, and a downward trend suggests that the credit-col...

By Marie Leone • March 13, 2006

Small Businesses Hit by Budget Cuts

Three-quarters of the 100 federal programs designed to help small businesses have been targeted for cuts or elimination in President Bush’s fiscal 2007 budget request, according to the House Small Business Committee.Cutbacks on small-business initiatives have increased 200 percent during the past...

By Stephen Taub • March 6, 2006