Big Fat Finance Blog

About This Blog Updated daily by members of the Business Finance Expert Network, The Big Fat Finance Blog is intended to arm finance professionals with innovative ideas and best practices that help finance organizations create value.

Report: Why We Need the 1099 Deluge

Small businesses are up in arms about a provision in the health reform law that will require them to submit a 1099 form to every vendor that they buy goods from, if their total annual purchase from that vendor comes to $600 or more (as I noted here). They’re worried that compliance will mean a heavy addition to their already crushing load of paperwork.


Republicans in Congress agree, and have proposed repealing the provision. But any such move would only perpetuate massive tax evasion by vendors, according to a report released today by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. more

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Hurd, Ellison, and Executive Pay’s Mile High Club

One of the more amusing disclosures (and there are so many) that followed the recent ousting of Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd was that the company was booting him due to a reported $20,000 worth of travel expense padding.


According to reports, HP’s board discovered that Mr. Hurd had filed inaccurate expense reports as they were investigating the now infamous sexual harassment charge brought by Jodie Fisher, a 50-year-old actress whom HP had hired to work at marketing events. Apparently, Ms. Fisher jetted near and far on HP’s dime, including trips to Europe and Asia, where the marketing contractor was employed to greet HP’s customers.


No matter: An investigation by HP’s board failed to turn up evidence of sexual misconduct by its CEO, and both he and Ms. Fisher have denied having a romantic relationship. Enough said. Now back to the $20k and subsequent expunging of $13 billion from HP’s stock market value. more

Hunting the Sales Tax Refund

One characteristic of high-performing sales-and-use tax functions is that they frequently conduct internal audits — aka reverse audits or refund studies — to make sure that the taxes they’ve paid were in fact due (see my June blog on a recent Aberdeen Group study). To get a better idea of how reverse audits work, I interviewed Michael Moore, managing director at audit firm CBIZ MHM, who says that his firm has been seeing a lot of interest in this area among clients. more

Four PCI Mistakes to Avoid

If your organization handles credit card data, there is no avoiding PCI. Most organizations treat it as an inconvenient fact of business life. They want to minimize the expense and effort of PCI compliance.


A month doesn’t go by that something isn’t in the news about PCI. Last month, it was reminders about the deadline to eliminate designated vulnerable PCI applications. That’s a serious concern. Click here for a list of these applications.


The goal of PCI efforts, however, should not be compliance for its own sake but better security of credit card information. It is about reducing risk to the organization and to the cardholders whose data is at risk. These are your customers. Losing sight of this goal leads organizations into making four critical mistakes, according to Tripwire, a PCI compliance tools provider. more

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At Alliant, CFO Boosts Collaborative Data Culture Allowing Analytics to Take Root

Like any newly recruited CFO, Mona Leung wanted to dedicate her first 6 months to learning everything there was to know about her new employer, Alliant Credit Union – the seventh-largest credit union in the nation.


Ultimately, everything she learned in those first few months helped her to answer one central question: How does Alliant make decisions?


“This begins with a lot of listening and talking with your own peers,” says Leung, whose “listening tour” also provided an opportunity for her to begin educating Alliant executives about how investing in analytics software could give the company’s enterprise risk management efforts a shot in the arm.


In Leung’s view, the fact that Alliant was many times smaller than her previous employers (Quaker Oats; Sears, Roebuck & Co.) was not a reason to ignore the value that advanced analytics could bring to the company’s growing risk management ambitions. But at the same time, Leung knew that realizing that value would depend largely on Alliant’s culture and how it made decisions. more

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