Internet Sales Tax Ruling Seen Boosting States

The U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to force online retailers to collect sales taxes may not lead to immediate credit rating upgrades for states but should provide a welcome financial boost over the long term, according to S&P Global ratings.The court on Thursday revived a South D...

By Matthew Heller • June 22, 2018

Carmax Shares Hit Record High on Q1 Earnings

Carmax on Friday reassured investors with an earnings report that showed an improvement in comparable store sales, sending its stock to an all-time high.For the first quarter, the used-car company posted adjusted earnings of $1.33 per share, up 17.7% year over year, on revenue of $4.79 billion. A...

By Matthew Heller • June 22, 2018

WillScot Expands with ModSpace Purchase

WillScot (Williams Scotsman) has reached an agreement to buy the parent company of Modular Space, a privately-owned provider of office trailers, portable storage units, and modular buildings, the companies said.After closing, WillScot will have more than 160,000 modular space and portable storage...

By William Sprouse • June 22, 2018

Supreme Court Ruling Scrambles Online Retailers

Online retailers took a sizable hit Thursday morning with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair.The 5-4 ruling in favor of South Dakota, which applies to thousands of such businesses, allows states to require them to collect and remit state sales taxes for internet tran...

By David McCann • June 21, 2018

Kroger Shares Soar on Big Q1 Earnings Beat

Kroger’s quarterly earnings easily beat expectations in an early indication that its program of investing in technology and store-brands is paying off.For the first quarter, the largest U.S. grocery chain said it earned an adjusted $0.73 per share on revenue of $37.53 billion. Analysts had expect...

By Matthew Heller • June 21, 2018

BEAT Could Eat into Income Tax Savings

Tax legislation generally includes promises to simplify the process of computing taxes. But in the process of transforming legislation into law, those good intentions often are overshadowed by new complexities.The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 is no exception, especially for U.S. multinational co...

By Ilene Mak, Tim Evans, Tifphani White-King, and Tom Barber • June 15, 2018

Shares of Payment Firm Adyen Soar

Shares of the Dutch payment-processing firm Adyen jumped nearly 90% in their first day of trading Wednesday, in what was one of Europe’s largest technology initial public offerings.The fintech firm, a rival of PayPal, priced its shares at $281.6 (240 euros) which was at the higher end of its rang...

By William Sprouse • June 14, 2018

Tesla to Cut 9% of Workforce in Profit Push

Tesla Motors has announced the biggest layoff in its 15-year history in a move to cut overhead as it faces increasing pressure to show a profit.CEO Elon Musk told workers in an email Tuesday that management had “made the difficult decision to let go of approximately 9% of our colleagues across th...

By Matthew Heller • June 13, 2018

How to Quench Investors’ Thirst for ESG Information

While companies are ramping up initiatives to win interest from an investor population that’s growing ever-more focused on sustainability, it may be a race to keep pace.Among the 47% of 189 investment professionals surveyed by strategic communications firm Clermont Partners who said they take env...

By David McCann • June 11, 2018

U.K. Fines KPMG $4M for Audit Deficiencies

In another blow to the U.K. operations of Big Four accounting firms, KPMG has been fined $4.2 million for deficiencies in its audit of a scandal-plagued legal services company.The U.K.’s accounting watchdog launched an investigation of KPMG in 2015 after Quindell plc became the subject of multipl...

By Matthew Heller • June 11, 2018

New Accounting Rules Test Companies’ Mettle

Companies’ level of readiness for complying with the new revenue recognition standard was a popular topic throughout 2017, leading up to the rule’s effective date for public companies.As it happens, the talk hasn’t yet died out.The rule is effective for public-company fiscal years beginning after...

By David McCann • June 8, 2018

Fears Over Downside to Clawbacks Are Unwarranted: Study

Even as the SEC continues to maintain that the clawbacks provision of the Dodd-Frank Act remains on the commission’s to-do list, failure to finalize the rule eight years after the law’s passage inevitably raises doubts about its ultimate fate.Yet the great majority of firms in the S&P 1500 ha...

By David McCann • June 7, 2018

McDonald’s to Lay Off Workers, Restructure Regional Offices

McDonald’s plans to lay off workers and cut costs by $500 million by the end of 2019. In an email to employees, McDonald’s U.S. President Chris Kempczinski said the company would be restructuring regional offices as it trims its corporate structure, according to a report from The Wall Street Jour...

By William Sprouse • June 7, 2018

When Are Execs Most Likely to Inflate Earnings?

It’s widely assumed that executives are less likely to inflate their earnings when they work at high-profile companies that operate under a good deal of regulatory oversight.And yet it’s also widely known that executives at such companies face tremendous pressure from investors to meet or beat Wa...

By David McCann • June 6, 2018

The Real Cost of Invoicing: Metric of the Month

For this month’s metric, we focus on the cost to invoice customers, per invoice processed, as reported to APQC’s Customer Credit and Invoicing Open Standards Benchmarking survey by 896 organizations. The process of invoicing a customer, for purposes of this benchmark, includes maintaining custome...

By Perry D. Wiggins • June 6, 2018

CEO Confidence Drops on Trade Policy Uncertainty

The chief executives of America’s biggest companies are scaling back plans for hiring and spending due to concerns over the Trump administration’s trade policy, according to the most recent survey from the Business Roundtable.“Uncertainties about trade policy are a growing weight on economic prog...

By William Sprouse • June 5, 2018

How to Implement the New Lease Accounting Standard

Many businesses will face great hurdles in implementing the new lease accounting standards, FASB’s ASC 842 and IASB’s IFRS 16. That is a stark reality, as the rules will be effective for fiscal years beginning after Dec. 15, 2018 for public companies and Dec. 15, 2019, for nonpublic companies.The...

By William Andreoni • June 4, 2018

Can Corporate Culture Bridge the Talent Gap?

This article is about human resources, but to the extent CFOs care about corporate culture and employees — and they should care about those things very much — I’m hoping it’s of interest to them.Lisa Greenough I’ve been in the HR field for three decades. A long time ago, we were called personnel ...

By Lisa Greenough • June 1, 2018

Six Steps Remote Sellers Can Take to Prepare for the ‘Wayfair’ Decision

For remote retailers, marketplace providers, international sellers, and many others, the world may change dramatically in the next month or so.On April 17, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in South Dakota v. Wayfair, a case in which South Dakota seeks to have a statute imposing e...

By Kent Johnson and Harley Duncan • May 30, 2018

Not Your Father’s Tax Department Anymore

Tax reform may have brought simplification to some aspects of the U.S. tax code, but it certainly didn’t simplify matters for corporate tax departments. At least not for the near term.Lenny Vairo Well-established corporate tax strategies, designed to optimize taxes on a global basis, now must be ...

By Lenny Vairo • May 25, 2018

Deloitte & Touche Fined Over Auditing Lapse

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has fined Deloitte & Touche $500,000 and censured the firm over its audits of Jack Henry & Associates in fiscal years 2012, 2013, and 2014.The accounting watchdog found that none of the engagement personnel Deloitte had assigned to its audits ...

By William Sprouse • May 25, 2018

Amazon Asked to Stop Selling Facial Recognition Tech to Governments

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology, dubbed “Rekognition,” to local governments, saying the system is “primed for abuse,” GeekWire reports.In a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the ACLU asked the company to limit how its Amazon Rek...

By William Sprouse • May 23, 2018

Fifth Third Makes Chicago Move With MB Buy

Ohio-based regional bank Fifth Third Bancorp has agreed to acquire smaller rival MB Financial in a $4.7 billion deal that will make Chicago its largest market.MB Financial, the parent company of MB Financial Bank, has served the Chicago market for more than 100 years, specializing in loans to mid...

By Matthew Heller • May 22, 2018

It’s Time to Review the Advertising Budget

Advertising spend is often a “black box” for finance professionals and when budgets and economic conditions are tight, it can be the first area to be cut.The correlation of ad spend to revenue is usually not well understood, while spending reductions will presumably flow directly to the bottom li...

By Grant Fitz • May 22, 2018

Deere Profits Jump 50% to Record $1.21B

Deere & Co. shares jumped more than 5% on Friday after the world’s largest farm-equipment maker reported record quarterly profits on a surge in equipment sales.For the second quarter, Deere’s net income rose 50% to $1.21 billion, or $3.67 per share, while worldwide net sales and revenues incr...

By Matthew Heller • May 21, 2018