Freed from the Budget

In his book Winning, General Electric’s Jack Welch famously griped: “It sucks the energy, time, fun, and big dreams out of an organization. It hides opportunity and stunts growth. It brings out the most unproductive behaviors in an organization, from sandbagging to settling for mediocrity.”“It” i...

By Russ Banham • Sept. 1, 2012

Private Company CFOs Keep Financials Private

Sharing financial data with their company’s employees doesn’t come easy to many CFOs — even sharing it with their own finance team. Seventy-six percent of the 1,300 U.S.-based CFOs at private companies with 20 or more employees don’t state quarterly or annual financial updates with employees, a s...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 30, 2012

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

What Does Sustainability Really Cost?

Companies ranging from Clorox to Microsoft to the Coca-Cola Company are among 70 corporations testing the use of an integrated financial reporting model that combines tangible financial results with  environmental, social and governance (ESG)  factors.Unlike the more widely known efforts of susta...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 28, 2012

HP Finance Chief Faces Bulging Inventory

Just as rival Dell reported disappointing revenues this week stemming from shrinking consumer interest in traditional PCs, Hewlett-Packard CFO Catherine Lesjak Wednesday reported a 5% decrease in revenue from last year (from $31.2 billion to $29.7 billion), along with a one-time $8 million write-...

By Taylor Provost • Aug. 23, 2012

Accounting, Finance Staffs Happy to Stay Put

CFOs are sitting in the catbird seat in terms of the workforces they manage. While finance and accounting employees feel secure in their current jobs, they’re a good deal less cheerful about the prospects of career growth outside their current company, a new study finds.A Mergis Group survey of 1...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 22, 2012

Why Some Stocks Perform Better Than Others

Did you ever wonder why investors aren’t more interested in buying your stock or are more interested in the stock of another company in your industry, even though you are a “better” company?  The answers lie deeper than just looking at earnings per share (EPS), the typical place to start. Indeed,...

By Gregory V. Milano • Aug. 17, 2012

Accounting Differences Crimp Cross-Border Mergers

Dissimilar national accounting standards and the lack of adherence to international financial reporting rules seem to be a major deterrent to companies eyeing targets beyond their borders, according to a recent academic study.At the same time, cross-border acquisitions by companies of target firm...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 16, 2012

New Audit Standard Encourages More Talking

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) today approved a standard on how to help auditors and audit committees communicate better. While Auditing Standard No. 16 (dubbed Communication with Audit Committees) still has to be approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the form...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 15, 2012

Overcoming a Bias Against Risk

Here’s a quick test of your risk appetite. Your investment team has approached you with two variations of the same project: you can either invest $20 million with an expected return of $30 million over three years or you can invest $40 million with an expected return of $100 million over five yea...

By Tim Koller and Dan Lovallo • Aug. 14, 2012

What Slowing Economy? Free Cash Margins Say Otherwise

A measure of free cash flow shows that U.S. companies had less cash available to pay dividends, buy back stock, or just facilitate growth in the first quarter. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as their levels were lower because they increased their spending on capital assets; selling, gen...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 9, 2012

Medicaid Providers May Face the Music Over Unpaid Taxes

Medical suppliers, home-care providers, and hospitals that are delinquent on their taxes could face changes in Medicaid reimbursement, thanks to a U.S. government study that showed widespread tax evasion by health-care providers in three states.A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 8, 2012

Will New Financial Tax Be French Toast?

France’s long-awaited financial-transactions tax (FTT) came in with a whimper rather than a bang on August 1. The so-called Tobin tax is named after Nobel Prize–winning economist James Tobin, who proposed a tax on foreign-currency transactions some 40 years ago.Proposals for a European Union–wide...

By Andrew Sawers • Aug. 8, 2012

Penn State Disaster a System-Wide Failure

Power corrupts, as the old saying goes, and this was certainly the case at Penn State University, which for years chose to shield a pedophile rather than risk the reputation of its lucrative football team.From top to bottom, the system failed: from the then-president to risk management to the sch...

By Caroline McDonald • Aug. 6, 2012

Internal Audit’s Approach to Risk Needs Upgrading

Improving risk-assessment processes and enlarging internal audit’s focus to encompass broader organizational risks that have business relevance are top priorities of chief audit executives, but a large majority think that to do that, their internal-audit functions need upgrading.In a July Ernst &...

By Caroline McDonald • Aug. 3, 2012

Audit Relationships More Challenging Than Audits

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) issued a document yesterday aimed at improving transparency between audit committees and external audit firms, and reeducating industry participants on what its inspection reports are all about. While the document could help improve financial ...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 2, 2012

Two Ways about It

After months of heated debate, the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board split their differences in June, deciding to allow companies to account for lease expenses on the balance sheet using one of two approaches, depending on the type of lease. The...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 1, 2012

Dodd-Frank at Two

On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Two years later, regulators are still hard at work putting the mammoth law into effect. Although they have written thousands of pages of rules, they are far from finished, as contribut...

By Edward Teach • Aug. 1, 2012

High Court Upholds Health-Care Reform

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that upheld the constitutionality of virtually the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will have major repercussions for businesses as they weigh whether to change their employee benefit plans over the next two years.Many companies expected the court ...

By Vincent Ryan • Aug. 1, 2012

Recipe for Profits

Name: Mel HopePosition: CFO of Popeyes Louisiana KitchenPrevious Positions: SVP of finance and chief accounting officer of AFC Enterprises, the parent company of Popeyes; CFO of First Cambridge HCI Acquisitions, a real estate investment firm in Alabama; accounting, auditing, and business advisory...

By Marielle Segarra • Aug. 1, 2012

The Hedge That Wasn’t

The $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase that came to light in May stemmed from fundamental mistakes by risk managers — in particular, the belief that a hedge on credit exposures could both reduce the bank’s risk and earn billions of dollars at the same time.That’s what experts are saying ab...

By Vincent Ryan • Aug. 1, 2012

Too Much of a Good Thing

The 2012 CFO/REL Working Capital ScorecardIt’s one of the most important metrics for gauging a company’s efficiency and financial health. So when a new survey of 1,000 of the largest public companies in the United States indicates that their working capital continues to be much larger than is con...

By Russ Banham • Aug. 1, 2012

How to Structure Your Staff for Success

Structuring a finance department has some new wrinkles these days, thanks to the trend of CFOs taking on more strategic roles over the past few years. The way the finance organization is set up may indicate whether the CFO is a strategist and views the company in a holistic way, or one that mostl...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 1, 2012

Renewed Concerns about Renewables

If long-standing renewable-energy credits expire as scheduled starting this year, companies that have taken advantage of those hefty tax breaks for wind and solar financing will have to consider new alternatives.Wind-project developers or solar-facility owners typically have tax-equity partnershi...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 1, 2012

The Second-Greatest Risk

Multinational CFOs are increasingly looking to avoid the double taxation that can occur from manufacturing a product in one jurisdiction and selling it in another. Transfer pricing, the movement of goods and services in order to allocate profits, has become a high-ranking concern for finance chie...

By Kathy Hoffelder • Aug. 1, 2012

A Dozen Questions to Ask About GRC

Financial executives may wonder about all the fuss surrounding “GRC,” or governance, risk management, and compliance. Is it just a repackaging by consultants and software vendors that brings together risk and compliance management? Why does everyone have a different definition of GRC, and if it i...

By Norman Marks • July 30, 2012