If you were one of the many taxpayers scrambling to meet the recent tax deadlines, the question of just how the government spends the money it takes in probably crossed your mind at some point. The goal of the recently launched Data Transparency Coalition is to get data on federal spending, as well as regulatory filings and legislative actions available online, in a standard format.

Even when the government does publish such data, it often lacks consistency and can’t be electronically read, says Hudson Hollister, the Coalition’s founder and executive director. As a result, efforts to search the data to identify spending patterns or instances of waste, fraud or abuse are more difficult than they need to be — if not pointless. more

Earlier this week Stevens Institute of Technology unveiled the nation’s first cross-disciplinary financial research and teaching lab with a focus across financial systems, software engineering and cyber security. Called the Hanlon Financial Systems Lab, it recreates the trading floor environment to support integrated research and education in financial systems, quantitative finance, software engineering and cyber security

The Hanlon lab sits at the heart of Stevens’s Financial Systems Center (FSC). Noted as the first of its kind in the United States, the FSC will serve as a platform for financial systems research, and the development, testing and evaluation of software for financial networks and the investigation of cyber-security challenges in the financial domain. The Center was formed to apply systems thinking and related methods to analyze, understand, and characterize the behavior of the complex global financial system.

For CFOs, the FSC may provide prime recruitment ground for talent trained in leading edge financial approaches. Overall, 28% of Stevens grads last year went in Finance. more

Today organizations spend more than 70% of their IT budget just keeping the systems running, and most of that gets sucked up by labor. That leaves, at best, about 30% to spend on new initiatives, which is where your next competitive advantage is going to come from.

To flip the situation around, IBM this week unveiled a family of what it describes as expert integrated systems called PureSystems. The first two are PureFlex and PureApplication. IBM calls these expert systems because it has baked into the system large amounts of automated best practices around the majority of the processes for which most organizations need systems, whether web applications, database applications, or almost anything else a company might do.

These are, according to Rod Adkins, senior vice president in charge of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, “a new category of business computing that combines server, storage and networking resources along with an array of built-in software patterns and business processes into one highly automated and easily managed machine.” Here’s how this can change the IT cost-value equation. more

The IRS takes a dim view of transactions where the claim of a personal goodwill sale produces a tax result too good to be true.

Increasing numbers of baby boomers will be looking to retire in the near future. This includes entrepreneurs who have developed successful businesses or professional practices. Many of them will pass their businesses on to their children or other relatives. But for others, retirement means selling the business whose success was due to their hard work and reputation.

If the business was operated as a C corporation, an asset sale will result in the seller paying two levels of tax. Moreover, current tax law provides significant tax benefits to sellers if the sale of business assets can be structured to produce capital gains rather than ordinary income. One way to eliminate the second layer of tax and produce capital gains to the seller is to allocate a portion of the purchase price to the seller’s “personal goodwill.” Purchasers will also benefit because the amount paid for the personal goodwill can be recovered over 15 years. more

For years, the news about IT security seemed predictably bad: more costly breaches, more attacks, new and different avenues of attacks. The latest IBM-X-Force report, however, actually contains some upbeat news, such as a reduction in application security vulnerabilities and 50% less spam. Find the latest X-Force report here.

The gains come not as the result of some magical technology that suddenly renders threats benign but mainly as the result of diligent pursuit of basic security blocking and tackling. Companies are being more alert to patching vulnerabilities faster and developing and deploying more security-aware software code. The attackers are still there, ready to exploit any weakness they find. Only now the software is not as vulnerable as before.

The latest X-Force report should not be construed to mean that companies can drop their guard or reduce their IT security spending. Deprived of their easy targets the bad guys, the report suggests, are pursuing different avenues of attack. more