To be sure, few of us like handing over our hard-earned dollars to Uncle Sam. What’s more, greater numbers are finding ways to avoid doing so. Mid-way through the current tax filing season, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration took a look at how things were going. Among their findings:

As of March 4, 2011, the IRS had identified 335,341 tax returns with $1.9 billion being claimed in fraudulent refunds. This is a jump of 181 percent compared to this time as of a year ago. (It should be noted that the agency was able to prevent the issuance of $1.8 billion, or 97 percent, of the fraudulent refunds.)

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For now, it appears that a shutdown of the federal government has been averted. However, if one were to happen, what impact would it have? According to many of those responding to a recent survey by John K. Paglia, Associate Professor of Finance at Pepperdine University, not much. In fact, just under half of the nearly 1,000 survey participants at least somewhat supported the idea of a shutdown. Another 13 percent were neutral.

Nearly one-fourth supported a shutdown for up to one month, although 5 percent would have stopped at a one-day shutdown. When asked about the impact of a one-month shutdown on the U.S. economy, 14 percent predicted no impact, while 27 percent said it would be only slightly negative. more

Financial services firms are ahead of the curve when it comes to risk management practices. Sometimes, individuals and business units within of these firms overreach when it comes to risk, and the world suffers an economic crisis on par with the Great Depression. However, that’s no reason to stop trying to learn from many other individuals and business units within the industry that remain on the leading edge of risk management thinking and doing. Have you heard of “regulatory arbitrage,” for example?

To get a better understanding of that term as well as risk trends within the financial services sector, I checked in with Sandeep Vishnu, a partner in the North American finance risk & compliance group at Capco, a global business and technology consultancy dedicated solely to the financial services industry.

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Contained with the 2,300-some pages of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is Section 627, which repeals Section 19(i) of the Federal Reserve Act, effective July 21, 2011. That means that what’s known as “Reg Q,” which had prohibited banks from offering interest on business transaction accounts, no longer is in place.

Interestingly, Reg Q was implemented during the 1930s, in an attempt to reduce competition for bank deposits, says Mohamed Siraj, vice president and senior product manager with Fifth Third Bank. Regulators thought excessive competition had encouraged unprofitable lending and caused financial institutions to fail. more

When IT people talk about technology “crossing the chasm” they’re referring to Geoffrey Moore’s book of the same title, which describes what it takes for a technology to be ready for mainstream prime time. Technologists have been talking about cloud computing in one form or another for a decade, but until it crosses the chasm, it’s of marginal interest to most CFOs.

Crossing the chasm means that the myriad pieces needed to make a new technology usable and valuable to mainstream businesses are coming together. A telltale sign that cloud computing is coming together is the formation of the Cloud Standards Customer Council. The Council, to be run by the Object Management Group (OMG), already includes Lockheed Martin, Citigroup and North Carolina State University. Other corporate participants listed on the Council’s website include Aetna, The Kroger Co., Citigroup, and Deere & Co.

There is no lack of technology industry groups wrestling with the issue of cloud standards — OGF, OMG, OCC, OASIS, and more, a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms. What makes this group different is its focus on the end users of cloud technology. The Council promises to provide companies using cloud technology with the opportunity to express their requirements to the technology companies building out cloud computing — a chance for the CFO to say what he or she wants to see happen. more