I think one of best epigrams attributed to Mark Twain is, “Everyone talks about the weather but nobody ever does something about it.” This also has relevance to the situation with corporate planning and budgeting. Bemoaning its lack of value and calling for some sort of change goes back a long way, but few companies have matured their process.

In the 1970s something called “zero-based budgeting” was all the rage in business and accounting periodicals. It was energetically advocated by President Carter to counteract the incremental budgeting that made it so difficult for the U.S. Congress to cut spending. (Of course, nothing changed.) Efforts to reform budgeting gathered steam in the 1990s as software vendors began offering dedicated applications designed for planning and budgeting. more

Technology expectations often conflict with reality, especially in the early stages of the emergence of a new technology. This certainly is the case when it comes to private and hybrid clouds, according to a just released survey by Symantec. The survey found that server virtualization (Virtualization is the foundation of any cloud initiative.) is the most mature, with 45% or respondents implementing it. The private/hybrid cloud is the least mature with 35% moving ahead with it.

Even where companies are moving ahead with cloud initiatives they may not be using them for their most important work. The Symantec survey found CEOs and CFOs are concerned with moving business-critical applications into virtual or cloud environments due to challenges around reliability, security, availability and performance.

The gap between expectations and reality can be seen in areas such as private storage-as-a-service (37 point gap), storage virtualization (33 points), and private/hybrid computing (32 points). With the most mature technology, server virtualization, the gap had narrowed to just 4 points (meaning 4% reported a difference between what was expected and what is being delivered). more

The global skills gap represents a big risk, but how can finance executives address the retention risks closer to home? Specifically, how can you more proactively hang on to that FP&A wizard who just put in the killer BI application or that controller who just may possess the strategic chops to succeed you as CFO in 10 years?

C-Suite Analytics Founder Dick Finnegan has a solution: “stay interviews”

Writing in the current issue of Consulting, Finnegan suggests that talent managers within the professional services industry – where talent is everything – turn conventional wisdom on its head. Rather than conducting exit interviews with top rainmakers as they are leaving the company to work for a competitor, why not shower them with the same time and attention that most companies invest in their customers? more

Guest Post by Cathleen Bucholtz and Matthew B. Chenowth

Public officials from California to Florida struggling to close budget gaps have discovered a new method of generating revenue — unclaimed property audits — that should put all executives on high alert.

The insurance sector has been the headline-making target of these investigations lately but this is likely to continue to blossom into broader scrutiny of all industries, even those with established unclaimed property reporting histories. more

Score one small victory in the drive to reduce the paperwork required of taxpayers. Last week, the IRS issued temporary and proposed regulations that would remove the duplicate filing requirements currently imposed for Form 5472, “Information Return of a 25% Foreign-Owned U.S. Corporation or a Foreign Corporation Engaged in a U.S. Trade or Business.” The complete notice was in the Federal Register on Friday, June 10, 2011. Generally, a reporting corporation must file Form 5472 if it had a reportable transaction with a foreign or domestic related party, the IRS says.

As currently written, the regulations require some companies that file the Form with their tax returns to also submit copies and any attachments to the IRS Service Center in Philadelphia, Penn.

The duplication no longer is necessary, due to advances in electronic filing and recordkeeping, the IRS has found, as this notice by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) notes. That said, companies that fail to file their tax returns on time still need to file Form 5472 in a timely manner. That’s because no procedures currently exist for electronically filing Form 5472 independently of an electronically filed tax return. As a result, a paper Form 5472 is required in these cases. more