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 ...

The Ten Biggest Family Businesses in the U.S. Business Insurance lists them: Wal-Mart Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer and most successful family business of all time. In 1962, founder Sam Walton took his knowledge of discount retailing and opened the first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Ark. It wasn't long before Sam expanded his business and opened up hundreds, then thousands of stores worldwide. After ...

Accounting for Nuts:  Blame a misalignment of incentives for the scandal at Diamond Foods.    The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins opines:  "Business people talk about "alignment of incentives." The lesson here may concern a peculiar misalignment of incentives."  He explains: Here's the executive summary: Diamond was a cooperative owned by California walnut growers until it became a publicly traded comp ...

Kravis: No Better Time than Now to Be Making Investments"    Private Equity International's James Taylor reports that at an invitation-only event in Monaco, the KKR co-founder said that low interest rates and a lack of capital offer 'enormous' opportunities for private equity: Kolhberg Kravis Roberts co-founder Henry Kravis struck a bullish tone in a speech in Monaco this week, dismissing talk of a "hard la ...

State Estate Tax Changes    The Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof Blog reports that the federal estate tax exemption was indexed for 2012, increasing the $5 million exemption to $5.12 million. Many of the twenty-three states, including Washington, D.C., that impose state estate taxes have also made changes for 2012. A list of state specific changes to estate taxes for 2012 and beyond is below: To keep up with ...

Three Practice Management Trends for 2012  For the third year, the MGMA has published the State of Medical Practice in MGMA Connexion. It's an overview of issues and industry perspectives that will shape medical practice this year. The Association collected information from healthcare professionals about the ways in which EHRs increase revenue, as well as what affects your compensation and practice collecti ...

Book Review:  Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business Family Business Review recently ran an interesting book review, by Jane Hilburt-Davis, of M.T. Green's book Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business: 9 Symptoms of Generational Stack-Up and How to Cure Them.  Writes Hilburt-Davis: Green introduces a new conceptual framework, the syndrome of “generational stack-up,” defining it as “the converge ...

Practice Management Companies Look to ACOs for Growth  Physician practice management companies are forging ahead with expansion plans into new areas of hospital-based medicine as they position themselves to participate in accountable care organizations and other aspects of health system reform, reports Victoria Stagg Elliott at American Medical News. The companies are not buying primary care and other outpa ...

Small Firm Innovation Wins ABA Journal Most Popular Site in Legal Practice Management Category Small Firm Innovation, a blog dedicated to first person accounts of small firm success, won the ABA Journal’s Blawg100 competition for most popular blog in the Legal Practice Management (LPM) category.  The ABA announcement reports: In the wake of the financial crisis and a rapidly shifting legal landscape, Small ...

Congress Could Pass Online Sales Tax Legislation This Year Are you used to buying stuff on Amazon.com and not paying tax?   Lots of business owners are doing it too. And that might change.  At Accounting Today,  Roger Russell offers an update: The impact of the economic downturn has been felt particularly hard at the state level, with many states operating under a deficit. Since taxes based on income don’t ...

The Bankruptcy Files: A Big Start to 2012 At AM Law Daily, Brian Baxter reports: Signs that the economy is improving notwithstanding, the number and size of large corporate bankruptcies could double in 2012, according to a new Fitch Ratings report covered by CNNMoney. Fitch predicts that corporate bond defaults will hit 3 percent this year—more than double last year's 1.4 percent and 2010's 1.3 percent. Mid ...

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 ...