Most small business owners surveyed by the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS), a trade association for more than 500 public sector pension funds in the United States and Canada, want to provide their employees with some sort of retirement plan. In fact, 82% support the concept of a new retirement plan that would provide employees with a guaranteed monthly benefit for life after they leave the work world. What’s more, more than two-thirds say they would be interested in adopting such a plan for their own businesses, according to Employee Benefit News.

At the same time, just one in five small business owners surveyed offer employees a 401(k) or other employee self-funded retirement plan, a recent survey by Nationwide found. more

I thought of writing a note on this topic when multinational corporations started to withdraw their deposits from eurozone banks, but the pessimism that event engendered was short-lived. Now, as the monetary crisis deepens in Europe, it’s perhaps time to ask what your company would do if parts of its financial system implodes. You may think that your company will not be affected because it doesn’t do business with the eurozone. Or you may believe that it’s unlikely to happen and therefore not worth spending the time to consider the implications. I think both assumptions are mistaken.

Several years ago, during the U.S. financial crisis, I was leading a workshop on planning and budgeting. As an exercise I asked the participants to consider what they might do in an intermediate-term scenario of 12 percent dollar interest rates and 10 percent inflation. Most immediately reacted that “that will never happen.” Of course they were correct – it hasn’t happened. However, that wasn’t the point. Planning is about considering what might happen and understanding the specific, measurable consequences if a scenario should come true. more

For many CFOs, the IT group is a cost center to be minimized. Ironically, the cost of IT systems remains flat (actually falling on the basis of cost per unit of capacity delivered). It’s the cost of administration, management, operations, and power that keeps going up.

Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software & Systems, made this point at a recent briefing: “Server management and administrative costs keep going up and the cost of servers drop and the cost of power keeps rising. These are the [IT] economics facing business today.”

The economics Mills cites are changing the way IT systems and capabilities are bought and deployed. The challenge to rein in IT costs has, in part, fueled the interest in cloud computing. Forbes Magazine looked at the issue here and found that there isn’t a simple answer. more

If you’re a CFO with a smaller company that’s about to undergo an IRS audit, you’ll want to take note of several statistics highlighted in a recent report, “Steps Can Be Taken to Enhance the Quality of Audits Involving Small Corporate Returns,” from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

To determine the quality of the audits performed by IRS auditors, TIGTA researchers at the IRS’ Small Business/Self-Employed headquarters reviewed 51 audits – not a statistically valid sample, they acknowledge – from a universe of nearly 7,000 audits completed between August 2010 and May 2011. The inspectors uncovered potential quality concerns in 19, or 37%, of the audits. Many involved issues between the corporate return and other, related returns, such as those for employment taxes or a shareholder’s individual tax return. more

The conventional wisdom holds that most companies have their operational and financial-reporting risk management capabilities under control. The problem resides in strategic risk management capabilities.

The conventional wisdom may be terribly wrong. more