Normalization of Income: Where Business Valuation Meets Forensic Accounting At the Legal Intelligencer blog, Terry Silver explains that since buyers and sellers often have differing ideas of a business' true fair market value, normalization is usually a required part of any M&A deal: The valuation of virtually every closely held business requires normalization adjustments. Although these adjustments may ...

M&A Will Likely Pick Up in New Year An Ernst & Young survey indicates longer term appetite for deals has increased, reports Anthony Noto at Mergers & Acquisitions. Private equity firms are more confident in the worldwide economy, suggesting an increase in M&A activity for the New Year, according to a report Ernst & Young released Wednesday. In the longer term, the appetite for M&A in ...

Study: Expert Witnesses Put Litigation at Risk with Wrong Benchmarks to Calculate Damages Marks Paneth & Shron reports that expert witnesses who rely on assumptions that overlook business reality often cause their testimony to be excluded on a Daubert challenge. Donald M. May, Ph.D., current director in the Litigation and Corporate Financial Advisory Group at Marks Paneth & Shron LLP, has published ...

Visualizing the Middle Market The Middle Market not only accounts for a third of private sector GDP and jobs, but over the last four years it’s been leading the way in terms of viability, resilience and growth, according to a new study from GE Capital. When it comes to economic development and employment growth, people tend to focus on either small local businesses or large multi-national corporations. But ...

Lessons from a Dying Business   Redbox has built a successful DVD kiosk business, but its days are numbered. Here's why that's not such a bad thing, report Karl Stark and Bill Stewart at Inc.com.  You’re probably familiar with Redbox, owner of those DVD-rental kiosks that you see parked outside of just about every neighborhood grocery store or pharmacy. Redbox is an excellent example of how to create growth ...

PwC Global Economic Crime Report: Cybercrime a Growing Threat  A new PwC report calls cybercrime one of the top four economic crimes – just after asset misappropriation, accounting fraud, and bribery/corruption, according to recent reporting in AccountingWeb.  What is cyber crime?  The PwC report, which you can read here, defines it this way: For our survey questionnaire, we defined cybercrime as: ‘an econo ...

A First: Law Firm Finds New Life, Not Death, in Bankruptcy  The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog Jacqueline Palank reports: A South Florida law firm recently used bankruptcy to do something no one in the legal industry has done before: sell itself to another firm. Companies across corporate America, from Blockbuster to General Motors, have sought court protection while they try to sell continuing businesses t ...