Calls for a VAT for the United States have subsided somewhat in recent weeks, as the Bush tax cuts have taken center stage in the national debate on fiscal responsibility.

That’s a relief for business leaders. It’s fairly safe to say that most of them are terrified of the whole idea. More than three-quarters of U.S. execs oppose a VAT policy, more than 83 percent believe that it will significantly increase the cost of compliance, the vast majority say that their organization lacks the expertise to comply, and so on and so on, according to a new poll by Sabrix Thomson Reuters. more

I’ve been working on a column about corporate risk management intended to cull risk management insights from the beyond-business realm (an endeavor that led me to “possibility management” and other variations on traditional risk management).

At least I was doing so until Aberdeen Group Senior Analyst Nasreen Quibria sent me a white paper draft that yanked me back into the domain of corporate risk management.

The report, currently titled “The Executive Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Agenda,” clearly and authoritatively presents the current state of global ERM.

(Full disclosure: I’m not on Aberdeen Group’s payroll, I instinctively groan at the word “analyst,” and — gosh darn it – I wish I had written this paper.)

The report examines ERM adoption (drivers, progress, and benefits, among other facets), lays out a process for achieving best-in-class risk-management performance, and offers a three-tiered maturity class framework. more

Senior finance execs and tax directors come in for a scolding in a new KPMG survey which finds that more than 40 percent of companies haven’t bothered to set up a formal policy or procedure to manage the exam process in case the IRS comes knocking on, or battering down, the door. This despite the fact that audit activity is definitely on the rise. more

Whether he was at IBM, DEC, Intel, Oracle, or one of three Silicon Valley start-ups, Paul Vilandre’s finance career led him down corridors where history was being made. One part CFO, one part Forrest Gump, Vilandre’s point of view on the role of finance frequently strikes a cautionary note when it comes to CFOs who prefer to focus more on their balance sheets than on P&Ls.

Interview Part I

Interview Part II

BF: Did Silicon Valley differ in terms of derivative hedging strategies?

Vilandre: One thing that was common to Intel and DEC was that we had very active hedging programs. At DEC, it was personally run by the CFO. One of my assignments when I was corporate group controller was to come up with a control reporting mechanism for hedging so that we could monitor how well were doing. One of the reasons for this was that hedging can create an awful lot of profit on the P&L, but it can also create losses pretty quickly as well. So, the first question is really, What is it that you hedge?

Most of what we were hedging was currency-related at DEC and at Intel as well. Think of currency from a high-tech point of view as a basket of products that are spread around the world. You don’t necessary hedge everything. Sometimes, if you have a position in a currency that is strengthening versus the dollar (e.g., the yen), by not hedging you actually make a lot of money. more