When Do Too Many Active Shareholders Hurt Instead of Help? At Forbes, Lawrence Siff relates his conversations with CEOs of two family businesses, discusses the challenge of bringing in new leadership, and offers tips on how and when to go about it:  ...

You've probably already read this story—Facebook Co-Founder Renounces U.S. Citizenship in Advance of IPO, Saving Millions in U.S. Taxes —heard about it on the radio, or seen it on TV.   But Paul L. Caron of The TaxProf Blog has done a remarkable job of aggregating all the media responses to the story from about 20+ outlets, and linking to previous posts this week on the developing story.     On Thursday:  B ...

Blame Disaster on Bad Inputs. Black-Scholes Works. The last few years have given us plenty of reasons to hate financial models. Models that promised to increase efficiency and manage risk became substitutes for common sense and justifications for greed. The real estate bubble was of course justified by them. Yet people at hedge funds and trading firms, using models to mint money, remain passionate believers ...

IT Guru Turns Out to Be Security Hole  Roger Kay reports at Forbes:  Small businesses have become a choice target for hackers, but by far the most common — and devastating — attacks on small businesses are inside jobs. This is the story of one such assault. The target (we’ll call him Peter) trusted his IT guy (Joe, for our purposes) because Joe worked magic.  Peter didn’t understand exactly what Joe was doi ...

S Corporation Rental Income Not Passive Except When It Is Peter J. Reilly reports at Forbes: Private Letter Ruling 201118011   A C corporation is a taxable entity.  Distributions that it makes to its shareholders are also, generally, taxable to them.  People who don’t want to pay tax twice on the same income will make an S election.  The shareholders are taxed on whatever the earnings are regardless of dist ...