In Sydney, Australia, an accountant was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill a client who he had stolen almost $84,000 from. He had failed to remit those amounts to the government for taxes owed by the victim. The motive was, unsur­pris­ingly, to “stop Mr Williams from bringing the fraud to light.” This is pretty crazy […]

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Tech companies are the primary focus of the SEC’s recently announced and currently ongoing inves­ti­gation into options dating irreg­u­lar­ities, which makes sense given their proclivity for awarding stock options as part of compen­sation packages with employees. An article in BusinessWeek documents what tech company execu­tives have recently termed a “witch hunt”: Many execu­tives are surprised […]

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Sometimes when I’m looking for inspi­ration for a blog post I’ll scan the news sites for mentions of accounting, in the hopes that there’ll be some new devel­opment I can write about. Unfor­tu­nately, in accounting, new devel­op­ments aren’t frequent and usually are pretty boring. It’s the nature of the beast. So when I found this story […]

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There are several ways in which a business can improve their cash flow situation by optimizing their payables management. Mostly this relates to timing issues – when to pay your suppliers. Pay invoices on or close to the due date. Supplier terms are typically the only source of interest-free credit your business is going to […]

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Brocade Commu­ni­ca­tions Systems has become the first company to be formally inves­ti­gated by the SEC regarding the recent options backdating issue. According to the SEC’s complaint document, which names three former execu­tives of the company as plain­tiffs, from 2000 through 2004 the company inflated net income by under­stating their options-related expense through fraud­ulent schemes to […]

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