Estate of Natale B. Giustina v. Commissioner What happens when a case lands in the United States Tax Court where Form 706 found the fair market value of a business share at $12.6 million and the IRS estimates it’s worth $36 million? Find out, in Estate of Natale B. Giustina v. Commissioner! At issue was a 41 percent share in a closely held timber company. Meanwhile, in the Delaware Chancery Court, In re Ans ...

Top Ten Deal Killers! It’s an too familiar story line in the deal business. After months of hard work and, in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and expenses, the deal blows up. Most of the time it’s solely the fault of the participants—usually the seller—but sometimes external factors can add to the risk of deal failure. The really unfortunate thing about these bad outcomes is that ...

Owner Personality Strongly Affects Business Value. Learn How. As consultants work with business owners to plan successful exit options, it’s helpful to spend some time thinking about how the business was built. Paul Brown here describes how different owner personality types—described here as “Mountain Lions,” “Wolf Packs,” “Beavers,” or “Ants”—tend to build quite different sorts of businesses. Different app ...

Medical Practice Benchmarking, Financial Performance, and Quality Care Benchmarking physician practices is an important way to assess practice value by comparing a practice's norms to peer practices in similar specialties or in the same geographic reason. Most physician practices, according to experts, can benefit substantially from benchmarking. Moreover, it's pretty easy to do! Here David Fein discusses w ...

Thursday, May 23, 2013Business Valuation Webinar Week: Valuation Issues of Renewable Energy InterestsTime: 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Pacific / 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. Mountain / 1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m. Central / 2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m. EasternCPE: 1 hourPrice: $145.00 Purchase WebinarThursday, May 23, 2013Valuation Databases to Improve Efficiency—Using Duff & Phelps Risk Premium Report and Risk Premium CalculatorTime: ...

What Data Valuators Need from Physician Practices—and Why! Physician practices are increasingly undergoing consolidation. Often that means being acquired by a hospital, and a prerequisite of being acquired is having a valuation performed by an independent, third-party valuator. Here’s information on the sort of data that valuators need (and that physician practices should be collecting today), an explanatio ...

Learn How to Set up Prevention Systems, Identify Relevant Data Relationships, and Think Outside the Box There generally are three types of people who commit fraud: die-hard criminals, otherwise honest people who give in to temptation, and otherwise honest people under severe stress. Strong internal control programs can help two of these types from making a catastrophic mistake. Here’s how to protect revenue ...

GigaOm M&A Advisor:  "Sales Don't Create Value.  What You Do Creates Value."  GigaOm M&A Advisor Marty Wolf explains how, especially in the tech field, five great ways to destroy your company include: 1. Opportunistic acquisitions 2. Growth for the sake of growth 3. Weak balance sheet 4. Convoluted ownership structures 5. Missing the window on a liquidity event How does this play out in the real wor ...

Good Grasp on Value Enables Better Tax & Retirement Planning, Reduces Conflicts The Washington Post's On Small Business blog cites data from a variety of sources that indicate most small business owners don't have a good grasp on the value of their business.  Written by Gerald Radican, the piece on the Post blog cites these findings from Spardata, a Maryland-based valuation firm: A typical business owne ...

In United States v. David A. Taylor IRS Lays Down the Law The Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof blog reports on a recent case demonstrating that if a fiduciary has a duty to pay a claim of the government before paying a debt—or they may be personally liable for the unpaid claims of the government!   Here are some of the case details: David J. Tyler and Paula I. Tyler were a married couple who held real proper ...

Weeding out Junk Science?  Or Scaring Off Competent Experts?  Are Daubert challenges really weeding out “junk science” and “pseudoscience” in the courtroom, or could it be that they are actually scaring off good, competent experts? Given the numbers alone, one can’t help but wonder.  Bullseye, a Legal Blog on Expert Topics, reports on a new study that examines the question. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 19 ...

New Medical Billing-Code Provides Precision; Nine Codes for Macaw Mishaps  Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers, Anna Wilde Matthews reported in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago.  Apparently, that doesn't allow for quite enough nuance.: A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000—addi ...

There's No Accounting for the Subscription Economy  It's taken over 10 years to get the idea of the subscription economy into our noggins, but we've barely started internalizing what it takes to support it and report on it as a business, reports Dennis Pombriant at CRM Buyer. Add "Accounting" for 32 Points and a Triple Score “Wall Street types are very accustomed to companies selling products rather than su ...

The Unjustly Neglected "Margin Call"  Ross Douthat at the New York Times thinks the Oscars missed crediting an important film this year: Speaking of Noah Millman, reading his Oscar post reminds me that my own comments on the year in movies neglected to mention what was perhaps the most striking injustice of the Best Picture nominations: The lack of any love for “Margin Call,” which was, as Millman writes, “ ...

Corporate Investigations Increasingly Aided with Digital Forensics Digital investigators can do more than retrieve data from devices. They can also use data to reconstruct past events to explain how computers were used to perpetrate wrongdoing.  Info4Security has introduced a new column, the Forensic Technologist, which will be written by Ernst & Young’s Simon Placks and explore how computer forensics a ...

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 ...

Increased Scrutiny for Private Equity Valuations The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has started an informal inquiry of private equity firms, asking for a broad range of documents on how the funds value assets and who invests in them, reports Bloomberg's BusinessWeek.   The agency’s Los Angeles office last year sent letters to several firms asking for details on fund investments and the valuation of ...

How Divorce Can Affect Business Valuation Stanley Morganstern at the Ohio Family Law Observer reports that recent case in Ohio illustrates the difficulty of valuing business assets in a divorce. Courts should avoid "double dipping," or counting a business' income toward valuation and spousal support. Instead, judges are to separate current and future income from the business' material assets before making t ...

Why PE and the Middle Market Tied the Knot Robert Teitelman at The Deal explains:  . . . This is the first of six special issues The Deal magazine will dedicate to the middle market in 2012, with a particular emphasis on a participant that, over the past four decades, emerged from that vast and diverse pool of midmarket companies: private equity. The current political debate tends to overlook the fact that ...

The IRS's 'Dirty Dozen' are Getting Old     So opines Gail Perry at AccountingWeb:  I for one am getting pretty bored with the tax scams on this list - they hardly change at all from year to year. It's time for some creative criminals out there to come up with something new. From the comments section: My brother ran a Schedule C Anvil Repair Shop from his garage in order to claim home office deduction, depr ...