The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful business-lobbying organization, has taken a stand against the presidential administration … but at what cost?

The Chamber is one of the most powerful business lobbying organizations in the U.S.; it spent more than $34 million to lobby the government in the third quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal. That represents a 68 percent increase over the same period last year.

Not all Chamber members (and a growing number of former members) are pleased with the organization’s increasingly outspoken opposition to the president.

“They’ve put Main Street businesses in a precarious place by taking a position that’s not credible and doesn’t allow them to shape legislation to their members’ benefit,” James Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy Corp. told the Journal in this article (available to subscribers and nonsubscribers).

The article, written by Stephen Power, is worth reading as it identifies growing schism in the business community over climate change and also the challenge a pro-business lobbying group confronts in representing a large and diverse membership at a time when complex issues affect these members in different ways. ###

Tucked into legislation aimed at extending unemployment insurance benefits is an amendment that could bring significant tax relief for businesses that have endured net operating losses (NOLs) in the recession. The proposal would let companies of all sizes carry back those losses for a refund of taxes paid in the five previous years, instead of the two years generally allowed under current law. The tax break looks a lot like one that was slated for the stimulus package earlier this year but was drastically scaled back at the last minute to apply only to businesses with revenue of $15 million a year or less (see my blog here.) more

The frequency with which you and your colleagues ask questions about International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) probably will increase in the coming months.

So, Protiviti’s “Guide to International Financial Reporting Standards,” which follows a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) format, is timely.

Answers include responses to many questions, include these:

• Where can I find the pronouncements regulating IFRS?

• What lessons can be learned from the conversion experiences of other countries?

• Is there a way to estimate the time, effort, and cost required for my company to convert to IFRS?

• How will IFRS affect analysts’ valuations of our company?

The guide requires a one-time registration (your e-mail address if you’re not already registered) and is available here. ###

As if retooling the one-sixth of the nation’s economy represented by health care isn’t enough to grapple with, Congress will come to grips this week with legislation aimed at drastically reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The climate bill, designed to make good on President Obama’s election campaign promise to chop carbon emissions back to 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, is scheduled for hearings in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works this week.

If you need to get up-to-speed fast on the tax implications of the proposed legislation — and let’s face it, there’s going to be some serious complexity here, if Congress decides to move ahead — a new brief from Deloitte offers a useful overview of the issues, including the vexed question of why exactly we need all the paraphernalia of a cap-and-trade system when a straight carbon tax could achieve the same thing (or could it?). There’s also an informative discussion of a recent report from the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) that looks at some areas of uncertainty that taxpayers would have to muddle through under a greenhouse gas program. Here are just a few of the murky spots: more

New research shows that performance-based contracting can lower costs.

The concept behind it — “power by the hour” or performance-based logistics — seems intuitively logical. That is, the price you pay for a product or service goes up as the level of service and up time it offers increases, rather grows as you run into problems. So, rather than pay an IT consultant to come out when your network goes haywire, you pay a fixed fee upfront for your system to remain running and problem-free. As a 2007 paper from Knowledge@Wharton notes, “The idea behind performance-based contracting is quite simple: One buys the results of product use (e.g., value creation), not the parts or repair services required to restore or maintain a product.” more