Understanding Both Sorts of Appraisal is Critical to Valuing Minority, Partial Interests in Holding Entities that Own Real Estate and Other Assets that are Gifted, Sold, or Otherwise Transferred   Randolph Glennon, MAI, CRE, MBA, and president of Eastern Appraisal & Consulting in Portland, Maine, explains in the New England Real Estate Journal why there's growing need for appraisers who understand both ...

The Thought of Every Employee Working Together with a Shared Vision of Business Success is a Dream Situation for Companies.  Here's How to Make it Happen.  Gary Davie Friday at Management Today weighs in on how in 2012 the U.K. government (Management Today is UK-based) announced its support for employee ownership, recognizing its ability to promote long-term thinking and growth.  Since then, a number of leg ...

Tricky Problems Must be Shaped Before they Can be Solved.  To Start That Process, and Stimulate Novel Thinking, Leaders Should Look Through Multiple Lenses  In the April 2013 edition of McKinsey Quarterly, Olivier Leclerc and Mihnea Moldoveanu outline an approach for taking a number of different approaches simultaneously to solving difficult problems. These involve flexible approaches using team expertise. ...

Congress Needs to Reduce, if Not Eliminate, Support of the Mortgage Market in Order to Encourage Private Capital to Enter the Market, Says Agency Head Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Acting Director Edward J. DeMarco said that Congress needs to take action to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the government’s continued support of the mortgage market and make it more palatable for private capital ...

Past Performance is No Longer a Viable Valuation Tactic: Learn to Anticipate Future Prospects with Data Mining, Proprietary Benchmark Techniques, and a Close Look at Both Cash Flow and Capital Expenditures.    Caleb Slabbert, writing at VentureCapital.org, which bills itself as a non-profit organization that has been "a premier resource for both entrepreneurs seeking funding and for investors who want to he ...

Choosing an Appropriate Weighted Average Cost of Capital Definition Sometimes Depends On Context Valuation principles generally hold that the value of a business is largely a function of return on invested capital and growth, writes J. Richard Claywell, since these are the primary drivers of free cash flow. But how does this cash flow relate to the asset and liability values on the balance sheet? ...

Particularly When Valuing Companies with Substantial Foreign Operations, Business Valuation Analysts Know That Country-Specific Input Is Critical  David Foster at BVWire News reports that in additional to his general data update for 2013, Prof. Aswath Damodaran (NYU Stern School of Business) provides a list of country default spreads and risk premiums.  Here's the professor's assessment: ...

Tax Court Judges Structured Trust Advantaged Repackaged Securities” ("STARS") as Illegitimate.  Costs to BNY/Mellon May Exceed $800M. The Internal Revenue Service won a high-profile tax shelter case involving Bank of New York Mellon Corp. on Monday, in a ruling that could cost the company more than $800 million.  John D. McKinnon at the WSJ Washington Wire reports the news: ...

Income/Franchise Changes in Wisconsin,  Sales & Use Exclusion in California, Nevada Supreme Court Upholds Margin Tax Initiative Deloitte State Tax Matters has a new set of updates on state tax law developments and changes. Deloitte's February 8th Issue includes additional detail on some of the cases cited and excerpted below. For more information, visit Deloitte's full State Tax Matters archive here. ...

Last Month’s Fiscal Cliff Legislation Included Lots of Tax Provisions. But Not Just for Individuals — There Are Tax-Saving Breaks for Businesses Too.  Here’s What You Need to Know. Bill Bischoff at The Wall Street Journal Small Business Blog reports that last month's fiscal cliff legislation included some important tax breaks for individuals; a longer version of his article appears at MarketWatch.  Here's t ...

"It's a Huge Case for the Patent-Law Community." On One Side: Google, Facebook, Intuit.  On the Other? IBM. "Because the patents are often unclear, there's no way to know whether an infringement claim by a competitor or a troll is legitimate until you've spent $8 million in litigation fees," said Mr. Schruers Ashby Jones in the Wall Street Journal  reports this morning that a federal appeals court in Washin ...

Increased Transparency, More Automation, and More Access to Capital   Rod Ebrahimi, a columnist for the Entrepreneurs section of Forbes, writes that "Thousands of miles away from Wall Street, some David-sized companies in Silicon Valley are cultivating new trends that will change people’s relationship with money." ...

Want to Develop and Publish a Mobile App?  Demand is Real and Growing.  A Compelling Idea, Solid Plan, and Choice of App Marketplace are Key.  Jeffrey Drew at The Journal of Accountancy reports that with the digital delivery of products and services emerging as a top technology trend, CPAs are beginning to explore the development of mobile apps. What they have found so far is that the path to the Apple App ...

The FBI Says it Busted an 18-Person Ring that Spanned 8 Countries and 28 States.  Make Up. Pump Up. Run Up. Daniel Gross at The Daily Beast explains:  It’s not the latest exercise fad. Rather, according to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it’s the three-step process through which an 18-person ring allegedly committed a stunning $200 million credit-card fraud.   Here're the bas ...

Six Days of Package Delivery and Five Days of Mail.  Does This Mean Stamp Prices Will Go Down by 16¢?   Michael Cohn at Accounting Today reports that the U.S. Postal Service said Wednesday that it will end Saturday delivery of letters starting in August, but will continue to deliver packages, in an effort to cut costs.  More: The Postal Service expects to generate cost savings of approximately $2 billion an ...

The IRS Has a Nationwide Organization of Approximately 2,000 Taxpayer Advocates to Help U.S. Individual and Business Taxpayers Resolve Problems.   Here's How It Can Help Advisors and Your Clients.  Nina E. Olson is the IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate. Since 2001, she has led the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS), a nationwide organization of approximately 2,000 taxpayer advocates who help U.S. individual and ...

Few Business Owners Seem to Even Know How to Make a Good Guess at What Their Business is Worth.  NY Times Introduces Technology to Help—and Certified Advisers Provide Extra Value.  Mark Cohen, at The New York Times Small Business Guide, reports:  "At 53, Joe Ritz is old enough to remember a time when many of the classic cars that now pull into his specialized repair shop were new. “It’s one field where it p ...

Aswath Damodaran, NYU's Legendary Valuation Expert, Recently Argues that there's a 90% Chance Apple is Undervalued.  Here's Why.   This comes in the wake of Apple shares' breathtaking plunge from recent highs. (That's be about $700 in September to $425 or so today.) In a new blog post, Sam Ro at Business Insider reports that Damodaran thinks that management can learn a few things from the recent market vola ...

Fed Buying Is Having Profound Implications. Bond Vigilantes Have Been Selling Heavily and May Continue. That Means We Still We Won't See Much of an Impact on Interest Rates. Paul Santos at Seeking Alpha claims you don't need to worry about the bond vigilantes anymore.  I, personally, have always been a big fan, and think they will return.  But hey: This is Mr. Santos' opinion piece, not mine, so I'll let hi ...

Annie Cushing is on a Mission to Rid the World of Ugly Data.  Learn About Data Collection, Analytics, Technical SEO, Analysis, and Beautification.   Annie Cushing,  a Senior SEO at SEER Interactive, a Philadelphia-based online marketing agency, explains that "There comes a time in a marketer’s life when making pretty charts with a predefined dataset just doesn’t cut it. "And finding the sum and average of a ...