A recent survey by Searchlight Interactive, an SEO (search engine optimization) and web marketing firm, found that 85 percent of business buyers use the Internet during the purchase process. Better yet, 63 percent of business buyers start their procurement searches online. Clearly procurement has moved to the Internet.

Ariba, crowned along with Oracle as a top procurement leader by Forrester Research in its March 2011 Forrester Wave procurement study, takes it even further with its Ariba Discovery offering, which it describes as a next-generation business matching service intended to connect buyers and sellers in the cloud. (”The cloud” here refers to the 470,000 Ariba customers making up its procurement community.)

Do CFOs and procurement need what amounts to another search engine? Maybe. A simple Google search could generate over a million hits. Most people won’t go through more than the first two pages of hits. Yet some worthwhile suppliers with just the right product, price, and terms for you might be sitting back on page 8 or 10 or whatever. more

As I noted in this post from August 2009, a move by the U.S. Postal Service to eliminate Saturday deliveries could impact some treasury operations. Here’s an update.

The Government Accountability Office just weighed in the matter. In a recently released report, the GAO notes that mail volume dropped by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010, due to the downturn in the economy and the increasing reliance on electronic mail. The USPS has lost $20 billion over the past four years, and expects to lose $6.4 billion this year. The GAO agreed that ending Saturday delivery would cut costs, but added that comprehensive restructuring of the USPS also is needed. more

I asked Bob Hirth, executive vice president and head of global internal audit for Protiviti, for some help in hashing over the findings of his firm’s 2011 Internal Audit Capabilities and Needs Survey (see my post on the research). I was also eager to ask him about the future supply of internal audit expertise, given the global talent shortage that some commentators claim is on the horizon (as I noted here and here). more

However, plan assets still lag liabilities.

Last year, the companies behind 100 of the largest defined-benefit plans in the country contributed a record $59 billion to their plans, according to the Milliman 2011 Pension Funding Study by John Ehrhardt and Paul Morgan. The contributions were nearly double the $30 billion the companies had expected to make (as determined from information within their financial statements) and resulted in a $12.4 billion improvement in the plans’ funded status. more

Seems like everybody’s piling on GE this week for what some have called its “tax zero-ization” tactics, after the New York Times reported (here) that the company paid no federal tax in 2010, and in fact claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

Jon Stewart joined the party last night with a blistering, and very funny, attack on the nation’s largest corporation: “Wait a minute, I thought the corporate tax rate needed to be lowered? I’m not sure you can lower it from … nothing!”

You can catch the rest of Stewart’s rant below.

But don’t miss GE’s response to its critics, which takes the Times to task for “erroneously” suggesting that the company makes use of “tax loopholes or innovative accounting.” In reality, says GE, the company has simply made full use of the foreign income deferral rule, a long-standing feature of U.S. law.