DreamWorks Animation Names New CFO

DreamWorks Animation has named Fazal Merchant as its new chief financial officer. Merchant is replacing current CFO Lew Coleman, who has become the Glendale, Calif-based company’s new vice chairman.A promotion for the film “Turbo.” Merchant’s appointment comes on the heels of the studio making se...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 19, 2014

N.Y. State Regulator Fines PwC for Watering Down Report

PricewaterhouseCoopers is being slapped with a $25 million fine by New York State’s Superintendent of Financial Services for the accounting giant’s alleged role in sanitizing a report about Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ’s “improper” dealings with countries sanctioned by the United States.In additi...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 18, 2014

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

New Highway Bill Offers Pension-Funding Relief

Congress has passed a highway funding bill that will be financed partly through provisions designed to lower the pension-plan contributions that plan-sponsoring companies are required to make.Pension plans will be asked to help fund projects like this but will likely get their money back down the...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 15, 2014

Alibaba Uncovers Questionable Accounting By Media Unit

As it prepares for the launch of its much-heralded IPO, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba might have to do a better job with its due diligence on companies it has acquired. Its newly purchased television and film subsidiary Alibaba Pictures Group (formerly known as ChinaVision) has revealed that i...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 15, 2014

Chiquita Rebuffs Takeover Bid

Sorry, President Obama. It looks like Chiquita might be doing a tax inversion after all. The popular banana brand rejected Brazilian juice maker Cutrale and financial conglomerate Safra Group’s $611 billion takeover bid on Thursday, calling the purchase price “inadequate,” reports Reuters.While C...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 15, 2014

Logistics CFOs Pressed on Tech, Talent Fronts

Providers of logistics and transportation (LTS) services are lifeblood for companies that buy bulk materials and ship products. At the same time, slowdowns or other glitches or inefficiencies in the services are maddening to CFOs, because they land squarely on the bottom line.As it turns out, fin...

By David McCann • Aug. 14, 2014

Cash Deal for Chiquita Likely to End Tax Inversion Plan

Chiquita’s planned to do a tax inversion with its acquisition of Irish fruit and produce company Fyffes. But an interesting complication has developed. Brazilian juice maker Cutrale and the Safra Group, a financial conglomerate overseen by Brazilian billionaire Joseph Safra, are offering to buy a...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 12, 2014

Media and Entertainment CFOs: Time to Invest

Most CFOs in the entertainment and media sector believe the economy has fully recovered from the recession, but their companies still face huge business problems like persuading consumers to pay for content and smoothly transitioning to new digital platforms.Dubbed, “It’s Showtime! Digital drives...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 11, 2014

What’s in Your Portfolio?

Modern market theory states clearly that no one can do much better than the average market performance for very long because universal information availability and transparency — the notion that everyone can see what the winners are doing and copy it — will force a rapid regression to the market’...

By John Parkinson • Aug. 11, 2014

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Aug. 8

Sean Creamer The Madison Square Garden Co. has appointed Sean Creamer to lead the finance function, effective Sept. 1. He takes over for Bob Pollichino, who announced earlier in the year that he would retire. Creamer comes to the company from Arbitron, where he was president and CEO.Panera Bread ...

By Joan Urdang • Aug. 8, 2014

Federal Tax Incentives Don’t Affect Capex, Survey Finds

Senior finance and tax executives don’t think the the expiration of two lucrative federal tax incentives at the end of 2013 will have caused their companies to cut capital expenditures by the end of 2014, according to a capex study released today.Just 10% of 100 CFOs, controllers, and tax directo...

By David Katz • Aug. 7, 2014

Geopolitical Risk a Nonissue for Investors in Israeli Startups

Israel may be in the midst of a military conflict with Hamas (or not, if the current ceasefire holds up) but that hasn’t prevented Israeli companies from making deals. Although some startups have felt firsthand the impact of the conflict, with employees called away on mandatory military reserve d...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 7, 2014

Senator Introduces New R&D Tax Credit Bill

Democratic Senator Tom Carper has introduced a bill that would make the research and development tax credit permanent. If the proposed legislation goes through, the R&D credit would not longer be temporary as it’s been since 1981, reports Tax-News.Democratic Senator Thomas Carper But there ar...

By Iris Dorbian • Aug. 4, 2014

SupplierPay: Cynicism, Optimism and Reality

Three weeks ago, the White House announced that 26 companies had signed onto the SupplierPay Pledge, expressing their intent to help their small suppliers by either paying them faster or facilitating their access to lower-cost sources of working capital. The announcement was greeted with a mix of...

By Scott Pezza • July 31, 2014

Has Twitter Finally Turned a Corner?

It looks like things might be turning around for Twitter, which had slumped since its initially favorable IPO last November.Yesterday, after posting better-than-expected earnings for the second quarter, Twitter’s stock surged to $49.73 in after-hours trading, surpassing the $44.90 closing recorde...

By Iris Dorbian • July 31, 2014

SEC Charges Former CFO with Hiding Internal Control Failures

The Securities & Exchange Commission has brought charges against Marc Sherman, the CEO of QSGI, a Florida-based computer equipment firm, and Edward L. Cummings, former CFO, for misleading outside auditors and shareholders about internal control deficiencies.The SEC is alleging that both knowi...

By Iris Dorbian • July 31, 2014

Senator Proposes Bill to Derail Tax Inversions

In a measure aimed to punish companies that are moving overseas to pay lower taxes, Senator Dick Durbin says he plans to unveil a bill that would ban federal contracts for businesses that engage in tax inversions, the Chicago Tribune reports.Sen. Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois Dubbed the “No F...

By Iris Dorbian • July 30, 2014

To Stop Tax Inversions, Obama Could Dust Off Old Law

President Obama is wasting time calling on Congress to squash corporate tax inversions when he could simply enforce an old law, according to a former senior U.S. Treasury Department official, Reuters reports.Former Treasury official Steven Shay Internal Revenue Code Section 385 allows the Treasur...

By Iris Dorbian • July 30, 2014

New York’s Proposed Bitcoin Rules Yield Protests

New York’s proposed Bitcoin regulations, which were unveiled by the state’s Department of Financial Services two weeks ago, are drawing mixed reactions from the virtual currency’s champions, reports the New York Times’ DealBook.Some of the smaller proponents, most of whom hope to benefit from Bit...

By Iris Dorbian • July 30, 2014

How to Hire (Not So Simply) the Best

I have always been fascinated by what we can learn from looking at what I call “edge cases” — what Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers” in his book. These cases occur at the edges of a statistical distribution and are by definition rare compared with the rest of the distribution of whatever capabil...

By John Parkinson • July 30, 2014

To Placate Critics, FDIC Drops High-Risk Merchants List

Following an outcry by Republican lawmakers that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was unfairly targeting legitimate businesses, the agency has pulled a “list of examples of risky merchant categories” from its guidelines for banks, reports Bloomberg News. The move comes after Congressional crit...

By Iris Dorbian • July 29, 2014

Risk Management Costs Up Slightly

For the third consecutive year, the average total cost of risk (TCOR), which measures how much companies spend on property, casualty and workers’ compensation risk management and insurance, trended higher, according to a new study.In 2013, TCOR rose 2%, from $10.90 per $1,000 of revenue versus th...

By Iris Dorbian • July 29, 2014

Oracle CFO Safra Catz Is Highest-Paid Woman Exec

You may think the highest paid woman executive is Yahoo head Marissa Mayer or PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, but you would be mistaken, says Forbes. Not that these women don’t generate a sizable income; both are currently on the top 10 list of highest-paid female executives, according to research firm ...

By Iris Dorbian • July 29, 2014

Another Tax Inversion Deal in the Works

Adding fresh fuel to the firestorm of protest about tax inversions is another possible deal that could take advantage of the strategy.Midwest pharmaceutical company Hospira is in talks to buy the medical nutrition business of Paris-based Danone for $5 billion, says The New York Times’ Dealbook. I...

By Iris Dorbian • July 28, 2014

Money Market Funds: Faking the Buck

It is a huge investment class: a $2.8 trillion one, to be exact. And it had long been thought of as a mundane one, just a notch more adventurous than a current account. Yet writing new rules for America’s money-market funds, which invest in short-term commercial and government debt, has been “one...

By Economist Staff • July 28, 2014