Reducing the Cost of Retiree Health Care

Companies that provide health benefits to retirees have understandably become ever more cognizant of the costs involved in recent years. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the cost of health care for a person over age 65 is, on average, 3.3 times higher than the cost o...

By John A. Litwinski and Nancy G. Ross • Dec. 14, 2011

How Good, Old-Fashioned Sales Growth Drives Value

During every holiday season, business and investment news seems to revolve around retail sales figures. To get the scoop on where sales are heading, journalists probe securities analysts, economists, customers, and industry insiders to collect valuable insights on store traffic, sales conversions...

By Gregory V. Milano • Dec. 14, 2011

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

Company Cash Hoards Swell by 11%

The biggest U.S. publicly traded corporations have been stuffing their already bulging balance sheets with increasing amounts of cash, new research suggests. By the end of the second quarter of 2011, in fact, 1,000 such companies were holding $850 billion in cash, or 11% more than they had on han...

By David Katz • Dec. 13, 2011

Three Ways to Survive the Euro-zone Mess

It’s the volatility, stupid.Last week, as European banks seemed perilously close to a credit freeze, six major central banks rushed in to ease interbank borrowing. The stock markets reacted buoyantly. By Monday, however, Standard & Poor’s placed 14 euro-zone nations on tap for possible credit...

By David Katz • Dec. 7, 2011

U.S. CFOs React to European Credit Crisis

For many CFOs of U.S.-based and managed companies, the message of last week’s actions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and five other major central banks to help hamstrung European banks to lend was mixed and worrisome — but indirect.The European banking system’s ills haven’t spread to U.S. banks yet,...

By David Katz • Dec. 6, 2011

How to Lose your LIFO Preserver

After much debate, the fate of U.S. generally accepted accounting principles continues to hang in the balance. Currently, the Securities and Exchange Commission is deciding whether and to what extent U.S. accounting standard-setting should be melded with the system of international financial repo...

By Robert Willens • Dec. 5, 2011

Free Cash Profiles: The Apparel Industry

As they do each year, analysts are zeroing in on sales figures for Black Friday and Cyber Monday to construct earnings forecasts for the clothing industry. Yet while sales growth is a prime indicator of health in the rag trade, the state of the credit markets may be equally important in gauging t...

By David Katz • Dec. 2, 2011

CFOs and CIOs: Can We Talk?

Last summer, a joint survey by Gartner and the Financial Executives Research Foundation found that 42% of IT organizations report directly to the CFO. The percentage soars to 60% at smaller businesses with revenues between $50 million and $250 million.The same survey pointed out that finance chie...

By David Rosenbaum • Dec. 1, 2011

Backlash Prompts a Revise

Protests from the construction, software, and other industries pushed accounting-standards setters to issue a new revenue-recognition proposal last month, capping a contentious 14 months since the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board first proposed...

By David Katz • Dec. 1, 2011

Smoothing the IPO Path

This year showed yet again how volatile the initial-public-offering market can be. The Securities and Exchange Commission kicked off its latest effort to open up funding options for private companies with an all-day meeting of its new advisory committee on small and emerging business in late Octo...

By Alix Stuart • Dec. 1, 2011

Time for a New Shirt?

Fashion can be exhilarating and trendy, but it’s also often fickle and fleeting. In order to attract attention and drive sales, apparel companies must continually design new and exciting products for demanding and fussy consumers. While those things are true in most industries, product evolution ...

By Steven C. Treadwell and Gregory V. Milano • Nov. 30, 2011

IRS Dives into the Bonus Pool

Reversing a position it had maintained for 36 years, the Internal Revenue Service ruled in November that a corporation can deduct the entire amount of its bonus pool even though incentive payments for some employees can’t be determined before the end of the year.Now, as long as the minimum amount...

By Robert Willens • Nov. 29, 2011

Excel Mini Bar Runs Dry

Bill H. wins a copy of Excel Outside the Box for his question: “Is there a way to add the sum button to the mini tool bar that pops up by right clicking the mouse? That’s for MS Windows 7, MS Office 2007,…and for that matter. Can anything else from the top tool bar(s) be added?”Microsoft made it ...

By Bill Jelen • Nov. 23, 2011

Employees More Loose-Lipped About Fraud

Employees continue to report incidents of corporate fraud through internal means in high numbers, despite new rules that skeptics had predicted would deter employees from keeping tips in-house before involving regulators.Just over 21% of incidents reported in internal hotlines and other reporting...

By Sarah Johnson • Nov. 23, 2011

How to Make Hay out of Buybacks

One of the most puzzling business conundrums today is the extreme propensity of public companies to buy back their own shares.  From the start of 2008 through mid 2011, the S&P 500 deployed nearly $1 trillion to repurchase shares, and for the second quarter of 2011 these buybacks surged above...

By Gregory V. Milano • Nov. 22, 2011

Tax Withholding Law Repealed

Employers dodged a bullet Monday when President Obama signed into law a bill repealing a requirement that federal, state, and local governments withhold 3% of the payments they make to vendors, starting in 2013. The bill also includes tax incentives for employers hiring unemployed veterans.While ...

By David Katz • Nov. 21, 2011

The True Costs of Being Public: More Than You Think

Most studies of the costs associated with initial public offerings focus on the dollars it takes for newly public companies to comply with everyone’s favorite scapegoat, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. According to conventional wisdom, it’s those compliance costs that are holding back companies from goin...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 18, 2011

Chugging Along: How Transportation Uses Capital

Transportation is a diverse industry, rich in operating cash. It includes, for instance, companies in the railroad, trucking, water and air transport, pipeline (excluding natural gas), and services businesses. What’s more, the largest 100 transportation companies traded on U.S. exchanges from 200...

By Gregory V. Milano • Nov. 17, 2011

Construction, Software Industry Protests Spur Revenue-Recognition Revise

Protests from the construction, software, and other industries pushed accounting standard-setters to issue a new revenue-recognition proposal on Monday, according to the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s manager of the project.After FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board propo...

By David Katz • Nov. 15, 2011

Look Before You Leap: The IRS Relief Offer on Worker Classification

Misclassifying employees as independent contractors is a very common mistake made by employers. Often, errors stem from the complicated and fact-specific legal analysis needed to determine the proper classification of a worker.The consequences may be fearsome. An employer that has incorrectly cla...

By Gary Q. Michel • Nov. 11, 2011

When the IRS Forgives Tardiness

If taxpayers were asked to think of the Internal Revenue Service as a character in a play, chances are that many would personify it as a stern teacher — the kind who would send you out of the classroom if you were late.But when it comes to granting taxpayers extensions of time to make “regulatory...

By Robert Willens • Nov. 10, 2011

The Non-Tax-Executive’s Guide to State Taxes

In practice, CFOs and other nontax executives often may not fully perceive the complexities surrounding management of state taxes and the impact those taxes have on other business functions and operations. State taxes typically play second fiddle to the federal income tax and other taxes. As a re...

By Kellie A. Lanford and Marshal T. Kline • Nov. 9, 2011

New SEC Group Debates Easier Path to IPO

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s new advisory committee on small and emerging companies held its first meeting on Monday — an all-day event that covered a number of important topics, but with no signs of consensus in any one particular direction.The group was formed this past summer in re...

By Alix Stuart • Nov. 2, 2011

What a Corporate Tax Cut Might Mean

Consider this: if Japan reduces its corporate tax rate as planned, the United States will have the dubious honor of having the highest statutory corporate rate in the world. While the topic of taxes is always top-of-mind for CFOs, in recent months it has climbed higher on the national agenda as w...

By Mark E. Haskins and Paul J. Simko • Nov. 1, 2011

What Ever Happened to the Virtual Close?

Remember the “virtual close”? A holy grail of finance efficiency — and a badge of honor for finance teams that could achieve it — the virtual close (sometimes labeled a “soft close”) was touted as a way to facilitate faster and more accurate dissemination of financial results via a nearly instant...

By Russ Banham • Nov. 1, 2011