Will GE Cut Back on Middle-Market Lending?

General Electric is focusing more on its industrial business, with plans to curtail or even shed its lending arm, GE Capital.A Wall Street Journal story on Wednesday said that “shareholders continue to penalize the company for what they perceive as a risky finance business,” causing GE’s stock to...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 12, 2015

Is TCO Still Relevant in the Cloud?

There are some who would say that total cost of ownership (TCO) is no longer relevant.  After all, information technology is now firmly grounded in a service management mode, and cloud billing is based on “pay-as-you-go” by level of resource consumed.TCO was the norm in the days when capex spendi...

By Penny Collen • March 12, 2015

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

Cut U.S. Rates, Launch Territorial Tax System, Reports Contend

Lowering the top corporate tax rate and replacing the current U.S. global tax system with a territorial tax system should be among the top priorities of federal tax reform, two pro-business studies released this week suggest.For instance, dropping the current maximum U.S. corporate income tax rat...

By David Katz • March 11, 2015

Top 10 Tax and Accounting Mistakes Cost Companies Billions

With tax season officially underway, many corporate tax and accounting departments are busily preparing for the looming March deadline. Each year, however, tax and accounting mistakes end up costing U.S. businesses billions. In 2013 alone, U.S. businesses accumulated nearly $7 billion in IRS civi...

By Dean Sonderegger • March 11, 2015

Tesla Has Bumpy Ride in China

The lack of adequate charging infrastructure in China for electric cars has slowed sales of Tesla Motors’ cars, prompting the Palo Alto, Calif,  manufacturer to cut 180 jobs, roughly 30% of its workforce in the country.Tesla, which reported a fourth-quarter loss of $108 million on lower car deliv...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 10, 2015

Most Tech CFOs in the Dark About Revenue Rule

With the Financial Accounting Standards Board considering a delay in implementation of the new standard on recognizing revenue from contracts with customers, a new survey has found that more than half of technology company CFOs have not yet even familiarized themselves with the changes.FASB staff...

By Matthew Heller • March 9, 2015

FASB Moving Ahead With Nonprofit Update

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has taken a further step toward making the financial statements of nonprofits more useful amid some concerns that the proposed changes will make the standards system more complex.FASB voted 5–2 at a meeting earlier this week to issue a proposal to update t...

By Matthew Heller • March 6, 2015

Brazil’s Credit Market Closed for Business

A slowing economy, a weakened currency, and the fallout from Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s kickback scandal all have put Brazil’s overseas bond market into a deep freeze.No Brazilian company has issued debt internationally in the last four months, as overseas borrowing costs have risen after police in...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 6, 2015

Profits, But No Tax Bill

Nearly a dozen profitable U.S. companies are paying no corporate income taxes for 2014.A USA Today article on Wednesday said that 11 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 had an effective tax rate of zero or close to zero, despite having reported a profit for the year (real estate investment...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 6, 2015

Knowledge of Auditor’s Bias May Be a Dangerous Thing

Those lunches or other gatherings where audit preparers vent or enthuse about a client to accounting-firm reviewers may have a counterintuitive effect on the reviewer’s judgment, according to a new study.The conventional wisdom is that reviewers who are aware of a preparer’s positive or negative ...

By Matthew Heller • March 5, 2015

Nearly Half of Public Company Audits Found Defective

Audits of public companies by firms around the world continue to show high levels of significant deficiencies in areas such as internal control testing and fair value measurement, according to the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators.IFIAR members who conducted audit inspections fo...

By Matthew Heller • March 4, 2015

Why CFOs Need to Care About Accounting

The Securities and Exchange Commission is on a mission — gunning for instances of accounting fraud. For the first time since 2007, the SEC’s enforcement actions against companies alleged to have cooked the books is higher than the previous year, up 46% to 99 enforcement actions.This year’s enforc...

By Therese Tucker • March 4, 2015

Ready, Set, Divest!

More companies will divest units and assets to boost the bottom line and shareholder returns – and there will be more buyers “on the hunt” trying to scoop them up, according to Ernst & Young’s global corporate divestment study, released Tuesday.More than half (54%) of roughly 800 executives s...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 3, 2015

Citi Sells OneMain to Subprime Lender

Citigroup is shedding its consumer finance unit, part of the company’s years-long commitment to unload non-core units and assets.Citi said Tuesday that it was selling OneMain, provider of both secured and unsecured personal loans, to consumer loan originator Springleaf for $4.25 billion. The deal...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 3, 2015

Obama Cut Would Slash Deferred Tax Liabilities, Study Finds

Some finance chiefs who think the federal corporate tax cuts that form the centerpiece of most tax reform proposals would be an unalloyed good for their companies would do well to think again.True, the reduction in the current maximum federal tax rate for corporations from 35% to the 28% that Pre...

By David Katz • March 3, 2015

#CFOMustRead: CFO 2.0, Fearful CEOs

We chose both a “hard” and a “soft” story this week. (See below.)As a reminder, you can join our CFO readers who participate in #CFOMustRead by sending us your most interesting reads of the week from around the web. Send us the link as well as a brief take on why you think other CFOs will find th...

By Vincent Ryan • March 3, 2015

Watchdog Faults Ginnie Mae’s Financial Controls

Finding Ginnie Mae was unable to provide reliable financial information about $6.6 billion in mortgages, a federal watchdog has declined to approve the U.S. bond guarantor’s 2014 financial statements.In a report released last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Inspector Gener...

By Matthew Heller • March 3, 2015

Most Internal Fraud Still Swept Under the Rug

LOS ANGELES — Even when employers have good cases against internal fraud, they often don’t refer them to law enforcement. Many companies handle instances of such fraud internally and very quietly make the employee “go away.”But that can be a mistake, said fraud experts and prosecutors at Informat...

By Katie Kuehner-Hebert • March 2, 2015

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Feb. 27

Maria Henry Maria Henry has been named finance chief of Kimberly-Clark, effective April 27. She will succeed Mark Buthman, who plans to retire by year-end after 33 years with the company, the last 12 as CFO. Most recently, Henry held the top finance spot at Hillshire Brands, and before that was C...

By Joan Urdang • Feb. 27, 2015

Coca-Cola Joins Euro Bond Rush

Joining a surge of U.S. firms attracted to European bond markets by record-low borrowing costs, Coca-Cola has sold 8.5 billion euros ($9.5 billion) worth of euro-denominated bonds, the largest-ever sale by a U.S issuer.Thursday’s Coca-Cola deal boosted this week’s euro sales by U.S. borrowers to ...

By Matthew Heller • Feb. 27, 2015

Does Uber Usage Nick Business Travel Budgets?

Uber-growth company Uber shifted into overdrive in 2014, ascending to the status of worldwide phenomenon in what seemed like no time. Now its presence is being felt in corporate coffers.In the third quarter of 2014, Uber accounted for 3% of business travelers’ incidental expenses, according to Ce...

By David McCann • Feb. 27, 2015

Regulators Zero in On Audits of Related Parties

“Good friends help you move. Real friends help you move dead bodies.” Perhaps this ubiquitous (and anonymous) quote sheds some light on auditing standard setters’ recent emphasis on updating guidance regarding related-party transactions. Of course, by “real friends” I refer to a company’s related...

By Howard Berkowitz • Feb. 26, 2015

Small Firms Pay Bigger Slice of Revenue in Audit Fees

Small reporting companies constitute less than 3% of the total market capitalization of U.S. public companies but pay a higher percentage of revenue in audit fees than large and accelerated filers, according to Audit Analytics.Of 3,324 smaller public companies identified by the research firm, 3,1...

By Matthew Heller • Feb. 26, 2015

Regulator Wants Execs to Attest to Money-Laundering Controls

Seeking to beef up prevention of money laundering, New York’s top banking regulator has proposed requiring bank executives to personally attest to the adequacy of their money-laundering controls.Benjamin M. Lawsky, New York’s superintendent of Financial Services, said in a speech Wednesday at Col...

By Matthew Heller • Feb. 26, 2015

Considering the Cloud

See the companion piece to this magazine feature, What Does the Cloud Really Cost?The cloud computing bandwagon continues to pick up speed, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) arrangements now outselling licensed software. Moreover, cloud computing is winning corporate converts to infrastructure-as...

By Keith Button • Feb. 26, 2015