The Dangers in Coming Clean

Last month, in the re-flection of a growing trend across the country, Alaska became the 21st state to enact a so-called environmental audit privilege law. Designed to encourage companies to come clean on environmental infractions, these laws offer partial immunity to businesses that voluntarily r...

By Lauren John • Sept. 1, 1997

Wanted: More Securities Reform

The Private Securities Reform Act of 1995 was intended to make it more difficult for investors to bring “frivolous” securities fraud class-action suits. Backed by a broad coalition of corporations, trade associations, and defense attorneys, the act was supposed to decrease the number of suits fil...

By Joan Lambert and Joseph A. Grundfest • Sept. 1, 1997

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

Mac Attacked

If you ask CFO Michael L. Conley, it’s McDonald’s Corp. that deserves a break today. The fast-food giant has come under heavy criticism from Wall Street and the financial press for sagging domestic performance, confusing marketing campaigns, and insufficient attention to changing customer tastes....

By Lori Calabro • Sept. 1, 1997

Asset-Backed Fete

You thought there were limits to securitizing assets? Then take a note from Transmedia Network Inc., which lends money to restaurants. Restaurants repay a portion of the loans in the form of dining discounts that Transmedia offers to lure cardholders. The cash flow from Transmedia cardholders’ re...

By Emily S. Plishner • Aug. 1, 1997

Internet Browsing

Looking for insight into the latest proposal from the Financial Accounting Standards Board? How about advice on your year 2000 problem? Such varied information is readily available on the Internet–as long as you know where to look. This month we highlight six new Web sites of interest to financia...

By John Xenakis • Aug. 1, 1997

Too True to Be Good

By now, most workers have heard a barrage of reasons to invest retirement nest eggs in stock rather than Treasury securities and money markets. But sound advice about investing for growth has triggered at least one risky consequence: excessive 401(k) concentration in stock issued by employers.“We...

By Ellen Benoit • Aug. 1, 1997

Going with the Flow

If you take the long view, imaging technology has a big problem. Initially designed to handle reams of reports generated by mainframes in the 1970s, imaging adapted in the 1980s to local, decentralized PC networks and the copious printouts they produced. But the late 1990s is finally beginning to...

By Karen Spinner • Aug. 1, 1997

FEI has A Higher Reward

When the New York chapter of the Financial Executives Institute first made the phone call offering assistance to the city’s Catholic school system, Monsignor Thomas Bergin was apprehensive. The FEI group was starting a volunteer program for its members, then­chapter president H. Stephen Grace Jr....

By Joseph McCafferty • Aug. 1, 1997

A Penny for Your Actions

There is little question that Texaco Inc. reacted seriously to the scandal that erupted last year, when an audiotape was released of its finance-department executives making racially biased comments and plotting to destroy documents related to a 1994 discrimination lawsuit.Beyond the public apolo...

By Ian Springsteel • Aug. 1, 1997

Love in the Time of Portables

Believe it or not, it’s been four years to the month since CFO kicked off its annual buyer’s guide to portable computers. Along the way, we’ve runacross some great computers, some near-greats, and some never-will-be-great-even- with-a-stick-of-butter computers. Vendors have come and gone, and we ...

By John Goff • Aug. 1, 1997

Mortgaging the Mouse

As the new chief financial officer of Euro Disney, Philippe Misteli becomes a character in a story with all the potential for terror– or a fabulously happy ending–typically found in an animated Disney fairy tale.The terror, in this case, reflects Euro Disney’s debt load of $2.6 billion (15 billio...

By Victoria Griffith • Aug. 1, 1997

An Eye on the Millennium

On the evening of December 31, 1999, thousands of nattily-dressed tourists, counterrevolutionaries, neo-capitalists, and plain old partygoers will gather on the Great Wall of China. As the clock approaches midnight, the throng will raise their glasses in unison, look to the stars, and toast the b...

By John Goff • Aug. 1, 1997

Off Again, On Again

If unconsolidated joint ventures and minority equity stakes help your financial statements sing, get ready for a new tune. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) wants to clamp down on parent companies that squeeze earnings from unconsolidated subsidiaries without disclosing assets, liab...

By Ronald Fink • July 1, 1997

Supply Chain Brain

If there were a surefire way to improve your company’s cash flow, reduce capital expenditures, make your customers happier, and ultimately boost your stock price, you’d invest in it, right? Sure–but then again, if you believed in such a magic bullet, you’d also buy swampland in Florida.No technol...

By Elaine Appleton Grant • July 1, 1997

More Options in Stock Options

Judging from the media drumbeat over “obscene” levels of executive compensation, you’d expect Washington, D.C., to be casting a cold eye these days on stock options. Actually, the reverse is true, at least in some quarters. Fact is, options are getting a boost from the nation’s capital, in the fo...

By Gordon Williams • July 1, 1997

Telecom Dreams

Psychological and sociological musings might be the last thing you’d expect to hear from an executive of the leading manufacturer of equipment for communications networks. But last January, Marty Parker, a marketing director at Lucent Technologies Inc., took the podium at a ComNet trade show to t...

By Jeffrey Zygmont • July 1, 1997

All That Glitters

For commercial software vendors, 1997 will be a banner year. Five leading vendors– Baan, J.D. Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP–are expected to report combined applications- related revenues of more than $6.5 billion. Many smaller vendors are doing just fine, too. Year 2000 problems and the al...

By Vinnie Mirchandani • July 1, 1997

How to Succeed in IT

Information technology is now the single largest capital expense for U.S. companies; overall, only labor costs more. This fact has given rise to a painful dilemma. On the one hand, companies seek to contain costs, driven by the fear that IT will increasingly devour profits. On the other hand, com...

By Edward Teach • July 1, 1997

The Morning After

Mark King remembers vividly the corporate hangover that set in the morning after one big acquisition. In 1988, he was assistant controller of MTech Corp., a data-processing provider to banks, when it was swallowed up by Electronic Data Systems Corp. King was swallowed up, too: demoted by EDS, str...

By Stephen Barr • July 1, 1997

A Dirty Word?

Here’s a club your company doesn’t want to join, unless membership is secret: companies whose noncorporate shareholders are probably forking over at least $200 million a year in income tax they needn’t pay, because management is failing to exploit a 50-year-old tax break.That estimate comes from ...

By Linda Corman • July 1, 1997

OFF THE SHELF…OFF THE MARK

The phenomenal growth of MBA programs has helped business schools create a vast and lucrative new market: executive education. The range of executive programs–from short seminars to full-fledged executive MBA offerings–bring universities $3 billion a year, experts estimate.Revenues from executive...

By Stephen Barr • April 1, 1997