Can Execs Get a Handle on Intangible Assets?

A majority of senior executives believe that managing their intangible assets is an important issue, yet few have a viable process for measuring the performance of those assets, according to a new survey released by Accenture and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit.Fully 94 percent of th...

By Stephen Taub • Feb. 2, 2004

KPMG Names New Tax Team

KPMG LLP has named a new team for its tax services division, which was at the center of a controversy for helping clients set up tax shelters.James Brasher was named vice chair-tax services and John Chopack was named vice chair-tax services operations.“This is a first step in addressing the manag...

By Stephen Taub • Jan. 30, 2004

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

They Might Be Giants

Prologue: Back in the early 1970s, the accounting profession was a gentlemanly affair. Work hard, make a decent salary, and play golf on Saturday with your clients. Auditors were like bankers: conservative, straightforward, and ethical to a fault. Indeed, accountants routinely topped the lists of...

By John Goff • Jan. 12, 2004

Stingers: The 2004 State Tax Survey

It’s been a rough three years. In September 2000, the California legislature was debating a tax-relief bill intended to lower its “unprecedented surpluses” by giving at least $50 back to every taxpayer. Since then, the state has plunged into fiscal chaos, and voters ousted former governor Gray Da...

By Tim Reason • Jan. 5, 2004

Brand Family Values

After more than a century in the food business, RHM knows a thing or two about what it takes to make a brand a household name. Thanks to catchy advertising and years of careful management, many of RHM’s brands are so well known in Britain they have become part of the social fabric—to say Bisto gr...

By Tony McAuley • Dec. 31, 2003

Hidden Treasures

Intangible assets are at the core of what we do,” says Steve Ruffini, CFO of HIT Entertainment. “Our business is owning and managing intellectual property.”But as anyone who has observed the growing gap between the market and book values of knowledge-intensive companies will testify, getting an i...

By Ben McLannahan • Dec. 30, 2003

Divergence of the Twain

Efforts to converge U.S. and international accounting standards were dealt a major blow in mid-November when standard setters split over how best to account for the income-tax benefits of stock-based compensation.The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards ...

By Craig Schneider • Dec. 1, 2003

What CFOs Learn from the Factory Floor

Amid the rumbling, rhythmic sounds of machinery and the whiz and kaplunks of production lines, CFOs are finding unlikely allies. Enmeshed in the gears of industry (and etched in the silicon chips that run them) are the manufacturing theories of production pioneers like Walter Shewhart, George Box...

By Marie Leone • Nov. 10, 2003

Radio Flier

Forty years ago, when Sam Walton was still an enterprising young merchant in northwest Arkansas, he’d buy products directly from manufacturers. Then he’d personally deliver the stuff to garages, where he stored the merchandise until it was placed on store shelves.Things have changed since then. W...

By Esther Shein • Nov. 1, 2003

Quanta’s Leap

Every day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, an eerie silence falls upon the spotless workshop of Taiwanese laptop maker Quanta Computer. On all six floors of the factory located in Linkou, a Taipei suburb, workers, many of them women in their early 20s, take an obligatory quarter-hour nap, thei...

By Abe De Ramos • Oct. 29, 2003

The Right Price

Ninety years after Henry Ford decreed that all Model T’s would be painted black, most automobile buyers still wait months for a custom order. Today, Ford Motor Co. is working hard to shorten that wait. The goal is not just to make customers happier and thereby acquire more of them, but to manage ...

By Russ Banham • Oct. 1, 2003

Containing Terrorism

Every year, ships from abroad deliver more than 7 million cargo containers to America’s seaports. Framed in steel, standard oceangoing containers typically come in 20- and 40-foot lengths and can carry payloads weighing up to 60,000 pounds. They are each a model of logistical efficiency — and col...

By Edward Teach • Sept. 15, 2003

A Taxing Dispute

Last summer, Corporate America stood united before Congress to plead for the preservation of some $5 billion in export-tax benefits. Those benefits have been associated with the foreign sales corporation/extraterritorial income (FSC/ETI) exclusions, a government-approved regime of tax shelters fo...

By Alix Stuart • Aug. 18, 2003

Will Tax Insurance Catch On?

Last Friday, tax-free spin-offs got a whole lot more… well… taxing.On that day, the Internal Revenue Service officially ceased issuing private letter rulings (PLRs) for tax-free transactions. Experts say the year-long pilot program, a dramatic policy shift for the IRS, could lead corporate execut...

By Marie Leone • Aug. 12, 2003

Booby Trap in Aisle Eight

Are vendor allowances more trouble than they’re worth?Don’t ask Michael Meurs that question. The one-time CFO at Dutch supermarket operator Royal Ahold, Meurs was forced to resign from his job in February — along with Ahold CEO Cees van der Hoeven. The reason for the sudden departures: Ahold mana...

By Craig Schneider • Aug. 11, 2003

How Audits Must Change

Auditors have been on the defensive since Arthur Andersen LLP was shut down in the wake of the Enron scandal. But by this point, with the massive accounting fraud revealed at health-care behemoth HealthSouth Corp., all the remaining Big Four have been tarnished. Today, auditors are fighting a bat...

By Kris Frieswick • July 1, 2003

Will Real Options Take Root?

Thirty years after the debut of the famous Black-Scholes formula, and 26 years after MIT professor Stewart C. Myers coined the term, real options has yet to catch on at most companies. Recent evidence, in fact, suggests the valuation technique may be losing traction. In 2000, Bain & Co. condu...

By Edward Teach • July 1, 2003

Troubled Times at the AICPA

Back in 1995 — back when Barry Melancon took over as the president and CEO of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants — even current critics had kind words for the chief defender of the audit industry. Mitchell Freedman, one of the 22 founders of a new group called CPAs Reforming O...

By David Katz • July 1, 2003

Tax Execs: IRS Scrutiny Bad for Business

Changes in regulations that reign in tax shelters has led to a substantial increase in the number of tax return disclosures — and a substantial increase in corporate concern about heightened IRS scrutiny. This, according to a new survey of 187 senior tax executives conducted by Deloitte & Tou...

By Jennifer Caplan • June 18, 2003

The New Rules of Engagement

Douglas Carmichael can be a hard man to track down these days.Shuttling between New York and Washington, the newly named chief auditor of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has been busy making the switch from the academic world to the regulatory one.Carmichael, who’s taking a ...

By Craig Schneider and David Katz • June 11, 2003

Net Taxes: Add to Cart?

Item #1: States budgets are under severe pressure.Item #2: Online retail purchases totaled $76 billion in 2002.Item #3: Web transactions are not generally subject to sales tax.You don’t need a Ph.d in astro-physics to figure out Item #4. As Amazon.com CFO Tom Szkutak noted in a speech this month,...

By John Goff • May 22, 2003

Your Supply Chain Has a Weak Link

Have any “sure signs” of your own? Send them to [email protected]. Departmental “Silos” Create Conflicting GoalsWhen a company’s director of inventory keeps tabs on safety stock, the head of production maximizes uptime at the plant, and the procurement manager drives down costs with a key ...

By Jennifer Caplan • May 21, 2003

Business Purpose Wiggle Room

For a spin-off to qualify for tax-free treatment a few things have to happen. To start, the “control” and “active business” requirements must be met. Furthermore, the device test must be overcome, and the distributing corporation must doll out enough stock in the distributed corporation to consti...

By Robert Willens • May 1, 2003

You Are the Guardians

As chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001, Arthur Levitt warned that inadequate disclosure and the conflicts of interest entangling Corporate America with its auditors and analysts could ultimately damage confidence in the capital markets. It’s fair to say that durin...

By Arthur Levitt • May 1, 2003

Waiving Dividends Goodbye

Normally, a taxpayer is not permitted to “turn his back” on income. To be sure, taxpayers must include their gross income in IRS filings when that income is either actually, or constructively, received. Moreover, under the pervasive “assignment of income” doctrine, a taxpayer cannot assign earned...

By Robert Willens • April 10, 2003