Accounting’s Big Data Problem

Dave Frankel was recently boarding an American Airlines flight in London when he heard a song come over the intercom. Although it was a Muzak version of the tune, he recognized it as one by a group he liked.When he reached his seat, he tweeted his appreciation of the airline’s interesting choice ...

By David Katz • March 4, 2014

Post-Snowden, Security Is No Longer Just a Feature

When Edward Snowden leaked documents about the extent of U.S. government spying, he probably didn’t foresee that he would change the market for enterprise security applications. But in a way he has. According to a report in CIO Journal, a new generation of smartphones and messaging apps are comin...

By Vincent Ryan • March 4, 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

Prolonged Ukraine Crisis Could Deal Blow to U.S. Companies

Which industries and companies could be hurt from the political and military situation in Ukraine? According to The Street, those at risk include large U.S. agricultural companies, energy infrastructure exporters and fast-food giants. All could suffer if the situation in Ukraine deteriorates furt...

By Vincent Ryan • March 3, 2014

Time to Clean Up Your Master Data

Businesses have always needed to create and maintain accurate and complete records of their operations and finances. Whether kept on stone tables, engraved scrolls, hand-written ledgers or computers, accurate, complete and up-to-date information has become an essential foundation for business ope...

By John Parkinson • March 3, 2014

CFOs on the Move: Week Ending Feb. 28

Retailer Bed Bath & Beyond has promoted CFO and treasurer Eugene Castagna to chief operating officer. He will be succeeded in his former posts by Susan Lattmann, previously vice president-finance.Finance chief Brian West has been promoted to chief operating officer at measurement and informat...

By Joan Urdang • Feb. 28, 2014

Investors Don’t Buy Corporate Yarn-Spinning

All those hours you spend carefully crafting the language of your earnings reports and press releases, aiming to exploit positive results to the fullest and put some pretty makeup on negative ones?Maybe you shouldn’t bother.Investors are wise to the subterfuge, according to a scholarly study publ...

By David McCann • Feb. 27, 2014

Corporate America Pays Higher Tax Abroad: Study

The Beltway view that a relatively high corporate income tax puts the United States at a competitive disadvantage is false, contend the authors of  “The Sorry State of Corporate Taxes,” a study released Tuesday.Many U.S.-based companies doing a lot of business abroad pay a good deal more taxes ov...

By David Katz • Feb. 27, 2014

Operational Culture Shift Drives a Huge Comeback

If your business is hurting, effective remedial tools might be in plain sight. You may just have to train yourself to see them.ARC Document Solutions, a 25-year-old company known for most of its life as American Reprographics Co., was knocked for a loop in 2008 and 2009. Lots of companies were, b...

By David McCann • Feb. 27, 2014

Faulty Risk Perceptions Buoy Specialty-Market REIT

Mark Peterson was working for a Kansas City-based regional public accounting firm, Donnelly Meiners Jordan Kline. It was 1995, and he had a new client, J.C. Nichols, a publicly traded real estate investment trust (REIT). Because of improprieties, the firm had fired many top executives, including ...

By David McCann • Feb. 26, 2014

Involving Finance in Editorial Decisions: Bloomsbury Publishing CFO (Video)

Bloomsbury Publishing launched in 1986, with the goal of bringing high quality books to the mass market. It grew at a respectable pace, publishing several successful novels (including The English Patient in 1992) and raising £5.5 million in its 1995 IPO.Two years later, its world changed. Bloomsb...

By Marielle Segarra • Feb. 26, 2014

Bad to Great: The Path to Scaling Up Excellence

Leaders who aim to boost organizational performance often start with efforts to kindle good behavior, however they define it. Yet case studies and rigorous academic research show that if you want to create and spread excellence, eliminating the negative is the first order of business. Destructive...

By Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao • Feb. 25, 2014

SEC Goes to Bat for Whistleblowers

In an amicus brief filed Thursday, the SEC wrote that employees who blow the whistle should be protected from retaliation under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whether they report internally or externally.Courtesy of Wikimedia user Zephyris. CC-BY SA Courtesy of Wik...

By Marielle Segarra • Feb. 24, 2014

Tax Filing: Are You Ready for March 17?

Filing taxes is a complex and time consuming process with bottom-line repercussions — and this year’s process is no different. As the March 17 deadline for filing corporate tax forms swiftly approaches, CFOs should be strategizing, planning and preparing. From multi-national tax compliance and tr...

By Kirk Hesser and Chris Bard • Feb. 24, 2014

Trying to Justify $19B for WhatsApp

Nineteen billion dollars is almost $2 billion more than the entire budget allocated to NASA last year. It’s about a billion shy of the market capitalization of Tesla Motors. It’s one-half-year’s worth of advertising revenue on the entire internet (if you’re talking 2013).  It’s almost three times...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 21, 2014

Why Not Pay Executives Like Private Equity Does?

With their proliferation of plan-design alternatives and features, long-term executive compensation practices have become more and more complex over the years.  Where once there was restricted stock and stock options we now have performance shares, stock-appreciation rights, performance cash, def...

By Gregory V. Milano • Feb. 20, 2014

HP Finance Chief Fought Autonomy Deal

In the end, the hero of the ongoing saga of the accounting scandal involving Hewlett-Packard’s acquisition of Autonomy Corp. may well turn out to have been HP’s CFO, Catherine Lesjak.At a July 2011 HP board meeting, “Lesjak vehemently opposed the acquisition to the full HP Board in July 2011[,] s...

By David Katz • Feb. 20, 2014

Excel Helps You See The Future

A reader posed the following question: “I handle forecasting for my company. I collect forecasts from the sales reps and attempt to turn them into a production plan for the manufacturing plant. Can Excel help me with this chore?”A lot of forecasting professionals measure forecast error as (Foreca...

By Bill Jelen • Feb. 19, 2014

Anything You Can Do, Icahn Do Better

Tim Cook’s nightmare is over, but John Donahoe’s has just begun. On February 10, Carl Icahn, the godfather of activist shareholders, ended his campaign to get Cook, the boss of Apple, to return some of its $160 billion cash mountain to shareholders through share buy-backs. Icahn declared victory,...

By Economist Staff • Feb. 19, 2014

‘No, Our Executives Didn’t Make That Much Money’

A growing number of underperforming companies want investors and analysts to know: “Our top executives aren’t making as much money as you think they are.”In this era of unrest over executive pay, the compensation data required to be disclosed in proxy statements may portray company leaders as bei...

By David McCann • Feb. 19, 2014

Policy Changes Open China to the Middle Market

In the fall of 2013, the Chinese renminbi (RMB) surpassed the euro as the second-most-used currency in trade finance, behind only the U.S. dollar. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) reported that in January 2012, less than 2 percent of world trade finance in v...

By Mark Perry • Feb. 18, 2014

Beware of Banks with Too Much Debt

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” says Ilya Strebulaev, quoting a line attributed to Mark Twain as a way of answering the question of whether the next financial crisis would look like the one that began in the fall of 2008.Strebulaev, an associate finance professor at the Stanf...

By David Katz • Feb. 18, 2014

Washington Mutual Lives On As a SPAC

Failed banks don’t always go gentle into that good night. Indeed, at least one is becoming a kind of special purpose acquisition vehicle or company, also known as a SPAC, for  leveraged buyout giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, reported The Street. At an investment conference Thursday, according to T...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 14, 2014

Berkshire Hathaway Exec’s Firm Faces Delisting Risk

When does sloppy financial reporting become sketchy? How many Securities and Exchange Commission deadlines can a company miss before investors (and journalists) start to ask questions?Maybe the answer to the second question is two, at least if one of the company’s officers is Warren Buffett’s lon...

By Marielle Segarra • Feb. 13, 2014

How Exposed Is Your Data?

I’ve been involved in various ways with information security topics and issues since around 1980. I even spent a year as the acting head of information security for one of the global credit reporting agencies. In that job, I looked after the security of 500 million identities, securing a network ...

By John Parkinson • Feb. 13, 2014

Market-Based Pricing Could Lower Cost of Credit

Since 2008, banks have increasingly extended loans to corporations based on the borrower’s credit default swap (CDS) spread, and according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York this market-based pricing could lower the cost of bank credit.Such loans tie the interest-rate spread to t...

By Vincent Ryan • Feb. 12, 2014