Breaking Up the Big 5

Stephen Butler is hardly shy. It’s just that he’s been trying to get along by going along. The chairman of KPMG LLP, the third-largest of the Big Five global auditing and consulting firms, has publicly kept his cool of late while the accounting profession has taken it on the chin.But now he’s rea...

By Stephen Barr • May 1, 2000

The Politics of Pooling

Metaphors both grim and flip swirled in the Senate chambers last month, as executives lambasted plans by the Financial Accounting Standards Board to eliminate the pooling method for business combinations in favor of purchase accounting.Medtronic Inc. CFO Robert Ryan told the Senate Banking Commit...

By Stephen Barr • April 1, 2000

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

Policing the Auditors

What began as a limited investigation of one of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s (PwC) branches two years ago has turned into wholesale scrutiny of the accounting profession’s biggest players. Publicly, officials at the Big Five are putting on a good face. Still, there are rumbles in the industry tha...

By Leslie Schultz • March 1, 2000

Loss-leader or Client-feeder?

The margins in auditing are not marginal. Public accounting firms may poor-mouth, but “the audit practice is not a loss-leader,” says Lynn Turner, chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not only can the accounting profession balance its books when it comes to auditing, he say...

By Steve Bergsman • Feb. 1, 2000

Better Returns via the Web

Here comes an online tool designed to optimize cash management decisions. TreasuryPoint.com (www.treasurypoint.com) heralds the computing and real-time analytical power of the Web, promising to increase investment returns or reduce borrowing costs.Unveiled in October by SEI Investments Co., a $36...

By Steve Bergsman • Feb. 1, 2000

The Second Annual Knowledge Capital Scoreboard: A Knowing Glance

Click Here for the Knowledge Capital Scorecard RankingsIncreasingly, intangible knowledge assets are dwarfing the value of tangible book assets at many companies. But don’t ask for details. While corporate reports heap praise on various efforts to capitalize on knowledge, they fail to supply reli...

By S.L. Mintz • Feb. 1, 2000

Mattel no longer playing around

Family MattersIt’s all in the family at Miami-based United Petroleum Corp. As part of a bankruptcy reorganization, Joe P. Bared, 57, was named chairman and CEO. His son, 31-year-old Carlos Bared, is replacing CFO L. Douglas Keene Jr. Carlos was previously CFO of F.S. Convenience Stores.Former Bro...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Feb. 1, 2000

HOW THE WEB WAS WON

If you logged on to the Internet and wanted to find out about the latest quarterly earnings for International Paper Co., you would need to look no further than the corporate home page (www.internationalpaper.com). Right there, in the middle of the computer screen, you’d find a green hyperlink lab...

By Stephen Barr • Feb. 1, 2000

EMPLOYERS PILE ON THE PERKS

Quirky perks like dry-cleaning services and fully stocked company kitchens aren’t just for Silicon Valley anymore. JM Family Enterprises, a family-owned Toyota distributor in Deerfield Beach, Florida, offers plenty of nontraditional benefits. Associates at the company have free access to two on-s...

By Lisa Yoon • Feb. 1, 2000

A P&L FOR R&D

No CFO worth his or her stock options doubts the importance of research and development. Common wisdom holds that a company that’s six months late with a new product stands to lose a third of its market share. And R&D will only become more critical, as product life cycles shrink and new produ...

By Ron Fink and George Donnelly • Feb. 1, 2000

Loss-leader or Client-feeder?

The margins in auditing are not marginal. Public accounting firms may poor-mouth, but “the audit practice is not a loss- leader,” says Lynn Turner, chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not only can the accounting profession balance its books when it comes to auditing, he sa...

By Steve Bergsman • Feb. 1, 2000

A “Carrier” Is Sinking

Despite pronouncements from the business community that a comprehensive reform of the nation’s system for distributing securities is dead, the agency proposing the omnibus measure isn’t abandoning ship. The massive overhaul, nicknamed the Aircraft Carrier proposal because of its size and complexi...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Feb. 1, 2000

Help for Web Feats

Although everyone knows you shouldn’t judge a company by its Web site, the growth of Internet research and investing is raising the bar for online information. In response, companies are increasingly jazzing up their investor sites, and more often outsourcing some of the sophisticated new feature...

By George Donnelly • Jan. 1, 2000

Say Good-bye to the Maytag man

Man At The TopAT&T Corp. called on a prominent Hughes Electronics Corp. executive to lead its corporate office. Charles Noski, 47, was named CFO of the Basking Ridge, N.J.-based telephone and cable-television conglomerate. The former president and COO of Hughes succeeds Daniel Somers, who wil...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Jan. 1, 2000

A Segment Checkup

New regulations requiring diligent business segment reporting went into effect last year, but so far the Securities and Exchange Commission hasn’t been particularly pleased with the results required under Financial Accounting Standard 131. SEC chief accountant Lynn Turner told the Chicago chapter...

By Steve Bergsman • Jan. 1, 2000

Changing Attitudes at Cargill

Category Winner:* Internal AuditCargill Inc. finance executives willingly admit that the company’s internal audit department wasn’t particularly effective back in 1991. The Minneapolis-based manufacturer of agricultural, food, financial, and industrial products had only one corporate-level audit ...

By Kris Frieswick • Jan. 1, 2000

Delivering the Goods

During the recent holiday season, Internet businesses hoped to avoid the ghost of Christmas past–the 1998 horror show in which E-tailers ran out of some products, couldn’t ship others in time, and offered ghastly customer service overall. Many online companies have since spent large sums toward i...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Jan. 1, 2000

A Bias For Charges

Restructuring charges are the rage. But they can come back to haunt you. According to a study by Vanderbilt University researchers, analysts are generally pessimistic, but not pessimistic enough, about future earnings after restructuring charges are announced. Restructurings, then, may provide th...

By George Donnelly • Jan. 1, 2000

A Capital New Year?

After sucking up a mere $29 billion and countless barrels of ink in 1999 alone, Y2K mania threatens to ripple into the New Year as a financial hangover. But with the worst of the digital conversion issue behind us, some predict the coming of the New Year will serve as a pep pill for a capital-spe...

By George Donnelly • Jan. 1, 2000

Is Sales Tax on the Internet Around the Corner?

For now, online retailers are still enjoying the benefits of a moratorium on most Internet state and local sales taxes put in place when Congress passed the Internet Tax Freedom Act in 1998. But the tax-free party that helped draw so many customers to the web could be coming to an end. Along with...

By Lisa Yoon • Jan. 1, 2000

“No-Talk,” No Good?

Provisions in merger agreements that prohibit the boards of target companies from talking to other suitors are “pernicious” and a form of “willful blindness.” But that’s not the spurned company talking. The harsh words are from two judges from the influential Delaware Chancery Court, which is put...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Jan. 1, 2000

Out of the IRS Penalty Box

If your company was one of the 3.8 million to receive a payroll tax penalty notice from the Internal Revenue Service last year, there’s a 90 percent chance that the penalty was too high. And, as high as the error rate is, the IRS isn’t disputing the statistic. The sorry news comes from a Californ...

By Kris Frieswick • Jan. 1, 2000

Milking the Pension?

The bull market has provided a pleasant surprise to many companies that find themselves with surplus pension gains on their hands. That happy news for companies sometimes translates into perplexing information for investors, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a hard look at broa...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Dec. 1, 1999

A Taxing Challenge

Forget death. For profitable companies, it sometimes seems that the only certainty is taxes. Within that framework, however, adroit management can make a profound difference. And finance departments across America are seeing that, even beyond the welcome boost to earnings, sustainable tax efficie...

By S.L. Mintz • Nov. 1, 1999

Getting Real

“The Edsel is here to stay.” That’s what Ford Motor Co. chairman Henry Ford II told Ford dealers in 1957. “There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.” Thus intoned Digital Equipment Corp. founder Kenneth Olsen in 1977. Even for business leaders with vision, the future is d...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Nov. 1, 1999