CFO, The Magazine for Senior Financial Executives articles from January 2004

CFO, The Magazine for Senior Financial Executives archives from January 2004

Juicy targets.(from the editor)(State tax practices)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... IN THE EIGHT YEARS SINCE CFO MAGAZINE STARTED surveying corporate tax executives on their perceptions of state tax practices (see "Stingers," page 32), relations between the states and corporations have only grown more waspish. This year,...

Foxy friends.(letters to the editor)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... I HAVE HEARD A LOT OF TALK LATELY regarding the composition of the New York Stock Exchange's board of directors. "Reforming the Big Board" (Newswatch, November 2003) quoted a securities lawyer who said of the old board, "It's a classic case of...

Ethical vigilance.(letters to the editor)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... I WAS DISAPPOINTED WITH YOUR ARTIcle "Whistle-blower Woes" (October 2003). It conveys an undertone that whistle-blowers are a nuisance to be managed, and that they ought to expect (perhaps deserve) the worst, based on the fourth-grade notion...

Raising the standard?(letters to the editor)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... IN "THE CHINA SYNDROME" (OCTOBER 2003), you say that "IT outsourcing... work is done in other countries where labor is generally cheaper." This causes unemployment and reduced business capital investment in the outsourcing country. Why do you...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
January 1, 2004... The November cover story, "Where Credit Is Due," incorrectly described the benefit of substituting long-term debt for short. Such efforts postpone payments not of interest, as the article stated, but rather of principal.

Blameless.(newswatch)
January 1, 2004... Unlike the recent accounting scandals, which brought the world images of CFOs being led away in handcuffs, finance chiefs have not played a role in the mutual-fund scandals. So far, no CFOs have been fired or forced to resign from mutual-fund...

The foes of enforcement.(Securities Regulation)
January 1, 2004... WHEN CEO SAT DOWN WITH New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer this past fall, he claimed that all was well between state and federal regulators as they worked to pursue securities fraud without stepping on each other's toes (see "Wall St....

Courting disaster.(M&A)
January 1, 2004... BY MANY ACCOUNTS, merger-and-acquisition activity is poised to roar back in 2004. But just as companies are considering new deals, along comes another potential roadblock: Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. At this point, the...

Turning the legal tide.(Class-Action Suits)(Punitive damage awards)
January 1, 2004... After years of watching punitive-damage awards and class-action settlements careen out of control, CFOs may start breathing a little easier. Tort reform--which had stalled in the fall--has made surprising progress. In November, key Senate...

IRS takes a closer look at pay.(Taxes)
January 1, 2004... EXECUTIVE-COMPENSATION packages are getting a lot of attention these days, and now the Internal Revenue Service is taking a harder look. In November, the IRS quietly announced an audit initiative focusing on executive compensation. The...

Age-old arguments.(Benefits)
January 1, 2004... The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case that could make it more difficult for companies to provide perks to workers based on age. Unless the high court overturns a ruling by a lower appeals court, it will be considered discriminatory to...

Force-feeding the PAC.(Politics)
January 1, 2004... A BANK OF AMERICA executive recently claimed that the bank forced him to make political and charitable contributions against his will. Duncan Goldie-Morrison, a former executive in BofA's corporate- and investment-banking division, says that he...

Fraud fast lane.(newswatch)(KPMG survey)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... A KPMG survey found that an astounding 75% of companies experienced at least one instance of fraud, up 13% from 1998.

Online travel sites go business class.(Corporate Travel)
January 1, 2004... Web travel agencies are targeting business travelers and their cost-conscious managers, launching sites that pose yet another real threat to traditional travel agencies. Road warriors have been digging up alternative fares on their own for a...

Bold new world.(10 Questions)(Interview)
January 1, 2004... LESTER THUROW is all about thinking big. In his new book, Fortune Favors the Bold: What We Must Do to Build a New and Lusting Prosperity, the economics professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management argues that the United States is in danger of...

The New Economy: don't look now, but E-commerce--and E-commerce companies--are staging a comeback.(techwatch)
January 1, 2004... EXCEPT FOR XEROX AND FEDEX, few corporate names ever make it into the lexicon of action verbs. The latest entry, however, appears to be search-engine specialist Google, which is now invoked routinely by users of the Internet ("How did you find...

Up all night.(Software)
January 1, 2004... FOR ALL THE CORPORATE EXHORTING of workers to cut costs wherever possible, employees remain a decidedly wasteful group. This is particularly true when it comes to using office equipment. Copier machines, expensive appliances to operate under...

The start of something big? A blockbuster fourth quarter gives even pessimists hope that M&A activity has finally turned the corner.(new deals)
January 1, 2004... WHAT A DIFFERENCE A QUARTER MAKES. The first nine months of 2003 looked bleak enough. Despite a slight uptick year-to-year in the number of U.S. mergers and acquisitions, the value of the dealmaking fell sharply--threatening to lengthen the...

Market timing: despite the controversy surrounding the Nyse, Keane Inc. makes the move to the Big Board.(Spotlight: capital markets)
January 1, 2004... WHEN THE DECISION WAS MADE SEVERAL MONTHS ago to move Keane Inc.'s shares to the New York Stock Exchange, CFO John Leahy wasn't anticipating the tumultuous events that have engulfed the Big Board. First, former NYSE chairman and CEO Dick Grasso...

Stingers: cash-strapped states put the bite on business.(The 2004 State Tax Survey)(Cover Story)
January 1, 2004... 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...

Corporate performance management: what finance must do to move the needle.(Calendar)
January 1, 2004... KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Robert Kaplan Harvard Business School Co-Developer of The Balanced Scorecard Free to the first 50 delegates to register: The new book by Robert Kaplan and David Norton--Strategy Maps: Converting...

They might be giants: it's been nearly two years since Arthur Andersen went under and Sarbanes-Oxley was passed. Have the Big Four audit firms changed since then?
January 1, 2004... 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...

Battling the property pirates: in guarding patents abroad, U.S. firms get little help from trade talks. But the cause isn't hopeless.(patents)
January 1, 2004... MORE AMERICAN COMPANIES THESE days are fighting in court to protect the intellectual-property rights of patents, trademarks, and copyrights. Indeed, roughly 2,700 patent lawsuits were filed in 2002, more than double the filings a decade ago,...

Watch how you think: insights from behavioral finance could change the way companies approach mergers and acquisitions.(M&A)(behavioral finance)
January 1, 2004... WITH THE U.S. ECONOMY ROARING BACK TO life in the third quarter of 2003, the revival of what economist John Maynard Keynes called the "animal spirits" of investors may be at hand. And that, to some observers, portends an uptick in...

Control(ler) issues.(The Sarbanes-Oxley Act Of 2002)(Compex Technologies)
January 1, 2004... COMPLYING WITH SARBANES-OXLEY IS TAKING QUITE A toll on corporate finance staffs these days--particularly on controllers. "When my controller is going home for dinner and then coming back to work, there's something wrong," says Scott...

Levi Strauss & Co.(CFOs On The Move)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... Levi Strauss & Co. CFO Bill Chiasson has departed without official explanation. The ailing company also announced it has engaged turnaround firm Alvarez & Marsal. Jim Fogarty, managing director of Alvarez & Marsal, has been named interim...

McKesson Corp.(CFOs On The Move)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... AMR Corp., parent of American Airlines, has announced that CFO Jeffrey C. Campbell has resigned and has taken the same job at McKesson Corp., a health-care supply company....

Tupperware Corp.(CFOs On The Move)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... Michael S. Poteshman is the new SVP and CFO of Tupperware Corp., replacing Pradeep Mathur. Poteshman has been with the company for the past 10 years.

Opportunity disintegrates.(grapevine)
January 1, 2004... JEFF CLARKE RECENTLY found out what Mick Jagger has known for a long time: you can't always get what you want. The former CFO of Compaq Computer Corp. resigned from his post at Hewlett-Packard Co., which merged with Compaq in 2002, when it...

Boing.(grapevine)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... An Ethics 101 student could have seen the conflict, but apparently Michael Sears could not. The former Boeing Co. CFO allegedly offered a job to Darleen Druyun, an Air Force procurement specialist, while she was overseeing negotiations on a $17...