Ex-CEO of American Tissue Gets 15 Years

Mehdi Gabayzadeh may not be as familiar a name as Bernie Ebbers or Ken Lay, but the judge who sentenced him Monday stressed that the misdeeds of the former CEO of American Tissue Inc. were no less damaging to victims.After several delays, U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert sentenced Gabayza...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 25, 2006

Deloitte Dumps Small Company

A tiny Puerto Rican landscaping company says it was dumped by Big Four accounting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP.Margo Caribe Inc., which had less than $10 million in revenues in 2005 and a $17 million market cap, says it did not have any dispute with the auditor in the past two years. The compan...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 22, 2006

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

Are You at Risk for Transfer Pricing Audits?

Following GlaxoSmithKline’s record $3.4 billion settlement with the Internal Revenue Service resolving a transfer pricing tax dispute last week, the top enforcement priority of the IRS has garnered the attention of multinational companies that want to know which transactions trigger an audit.Tran...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 21, 2006

Execs: Broken Tax System Hurts Business

Executives and government officials got a chance to sound off about the federal tax system, and tax reform during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday. While witnesses testified that the tax system is complex, inefficient, and costly, they also proposed principles for tax reform and pr...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 20, 2006

The Power of Four

Whatever you might think if your accounts have ever been qualified, auditors are only human. And humans tend to exploit their power. So it is understandable that Britain’s accounting watchdog revealed last week that investors and the finance directors of the country’s big companies worry about th...

By Economist Staff • Sept. 19, 2006

SEC Issues Option Accounting Guidance

In a public letter to the accounting industry issued Tuesday, the chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission issued new guidance describing how companies should account for stock options. The letter, a response to the ongoing backdating scandal, addresses a range of issues that ar...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 19, 2006

CA’s Examiner ExtendsTerm

CA officials have said the U.S. Attorney’s Office has extended the term of the company’s independent examiner to May 1, 2007, partly due to changes in the company’s finance department. The independent examiner’s term was scheduled to expire on September 16, under the original terms of CA’s Deferr...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 15, 2006

How Much is that Error on the Books?

The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued guidance that will help companies erase prior misstatements on their financial statements. Additionally, the guidance explains how, going forward, companies should quantify errors and correct them.Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 108 offers interpret...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 14, 2006

Sarbox 404: The New Feeling-Out Period

Next year, many finance executives will likely be able to take a sabbatical to get their companies’ internal controls up to snuff far from the annoying questions of independent auditors. But the executives shouldn’t avoid the auditors either, Securities and Exchange Commission officials says.An A...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 13, 2006

Pensions, Leases Worry PCAOB Member

The players in the U.S. financial reporting system are driving while looking in the rearview mirror, says one regulator.Speaking at a conference on Sarbanes-Oxley Tuesday in New York, Charles Niemeier, board member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), reiterated much of a spe...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 12, 2006

Krispy Kreme Delays Filing Again

With Krispy Kreme’s luster on the wane, customers may no longer have to wait on long lines to buy a donut at one of its stores. But shareholders will have to wait a little longer to view the embattled company’s recent financial reports. The company announced in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 12, 2006

PCAOB Revises AS2

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has submitted a draft of changes to the Securities and Exchange Commission for its Auditing Standard 2, a guideline that many, including the SEC and participants of the Sarbanes-Oxley roundtables, have wanted revised.AS2 has been criticized because au...

By Sarah Johnson • Sept. 11, 2006

Former Tyco Tax Exec Charged

A former Tyco International tax executive has been charged with filing a false tax return after failing to report roughly $170 million in income for the conglomerate, according to the Associated Press.Raymond Scott Stevenson pleaded not guilty to the single charge, according to the wire service.H...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 11, 2006

SEC, US Attorney Probing Dell

Dell Inc. announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York have launched an investigation into possible misstatements made in prior financial reports.As a result, the embattled computer maker said it will delay the filing o...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 11, 2006

GlaxoSmithKline Settles Largest IRS Tax Dispute

GlaxoSmithKline has agreed to pay the U.S. Internal Revenue Service $3.4 billion to settle a transfer pricing dispute that stretches back to the 1980s. The IRS says the agreement is the largest tax settlement payment in the history of the agency.Transfer pricing rules require that related parties...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 11, 2006

Largest Criminal Tax Case Settled

A telecommunications entrepreneur has pleaded guilty to what is being called the nation’s largest criminal tax case, according to the Associated Press. Walter Anderson pleaded guilty to two counts of tax evasion and one count of fraud stemming from charges that he evaded $200 million in federal a...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 8, 2006

Tax Uncertainty Sparks R&D Jitters

Executives at corporations with sizable research budgets are on tenterhooks about whether Congress will bring the research and experimentation tax credit back to life in September before members head home to campaign for the November elections.A provision for such a credit is part of a larger est...

By Helen Shaw • Sept. 8, 2006

CPAs Pessimistic about Economy

More than half of certified public accountants polled by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, many of them CFOs or controllers, are pessimistic about the state of the U.S. economy. The opinions of 54 percent of accountants polled ranged from neutral to very pessimistic. That’s ...

By Stephen Taub • Sept. 5, 2006

How Low Can It Go? The 2006 Working Capital Scorecard

Download the 2006 Working Capital Survey PDFAsked to explain his company’s success at driving down working-capital levels, Qualcomm CFO William Keitel demurs, saying, “You can always do better.”He’s not being humble so much as capturing the dominant theme for working capital over the past several...

By Randy Myers • Sept. 1, 2006

Delayed in the USA

Editor’s Note (August 2, 2007): In the wake of yesterday’s tragic collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, CFO.com has decided to republish John Goff’s article, which less than one year ago warned of increasingly serious problems with the nation’s crumbling transport system.June 2005. Things ...

By John Goff • Sept. 1, 2006

Progress Report

Judging from the complaints in the press about the compliance burden facing companies, you’d think that finance executives would be up in arms over regulation.Not so, according to a CFO survey of 213 finance executives. Most respondents have a relatively benign view of the efforts of regulatory b...

By Ronald Fink and Don Durfee • Sept. 1, 2006

Numbers Crunch

Five years after Enron, corporate financial reporting stands at a crossroads.One route leads deep into the lightly charted terrain of “principles-based” reporting, where thousands of rules and regulations would be replaced by a relative handful of guiding precepts. The norm in Europe, this would ...

By Ronald Fink • Sept. 1, 2006

Will Fair Value Fly?

Editor’s Note: On Friday, The Financial Accounting Standards Board issued additional guidance to help corporations and accounting firms measure assets and liabilities using the fair value method of accounting. The new rule, known as FAS No. 157, affects over 40 existing accounting standards—inc...

By Ronald Fink • Sept. 1, 2006

The Case for Clarity

The cost estimates bandied about by critics of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are truly staggering. By the end of the year, U.S. companies will have spent $20 billion to comply with the law since it was passed in 2002, according to AMR Research. One study from the University of Rochester attributes a $1....

By Kate O'Sullivan • Sept. 1, 2006

Days in Court

Ask those on either side of the securities-litigation fence about principles-based accounting and you get two different views.If there were no hard and fast rules, it would make it harder to bring accounting cases, since “most of them turn on what was the rule and did they follow it or not,” says...

By Alix Stuart • Sept. 1, 2006