A.E. Feldman Blog

A federal judge rejected Bernie Madoff’s plea for leniency Monday, sentencing the 71-year-old to spend the rest of his life in prison for an “extraordinarily evil” fraud, according to the AP. The report notes that U.S. District Judge Denny Chin cited the unprecedented nature of the multibillion-dollar fraud as he sentenced Madoff to the maximum [...]

Transfer pricing - complex arrangements companies use to allocate costs and revenue between operations in different tax jurisdictions - has steadily become one of the top concerns of the IRS. The agency was recently handed a victory in a dispute with Xilinx that could have far reaching implications for other multinational companies that use transfer [...]

Corporate bankruptcies are on track to hit a record high this year. There have been 100 public company bankruptcy filings during the first five months of this year, just shy of the 2002 high for the same time period, according to BusinessWeek, citing research from BankruptcyData.com. The American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) also reports that business [...]

The Obama administration is launching its biggest plan yet to combat health care fraud. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced the creation of a new high-level task force with the aim of detecting and preventing health-care fraud, which costs the U.S. billions of dollars [...]

The world of tax is changing and indirect taxes are at the heart of this change. Over the coming years KPMG says more jurisdictions throughout the world will introduce VAT/GST regimes (the current total is 135 and rising), and there will be an increased focus on protecting and broadening the taxable base on which VAT [...]

One of Orange County, California’s highest-profile luxury resorts, the St. Regis Monarch Beach Resort, is scheduled to be auctioned off on July 7th, according to the Orange County Business Journal. The report states an affiliate of New York-based Citigroup Inc. is moving to foreclose on the 400-room hotel which opened in 2001. The hotel is [...]

Mounting evidence shows that white-collar crime increases during a recession. The 2009 Report to the Nation on Occupational Fraud & Abuse study conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) reveals that more than half of the 959 fraud experts polled performed more fraud-related investigations in 2008 than in 2007. About as many respondents [...]

Private equity firms are following in the footsteps of Macquarie Group and the investment units at top investment banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. According to Pensions & Investments, they are shifting gears to focus on a new area: infrastructure investing. The report argues the credit crisis and recession have put the traditional [...]

Drug giant, GlaxoSmithKline, is battling the IRS over a potential $1.9 billion in back taxes, interest and penalties, according to Reuters. The case centers on a tax-savings technique used by the company known as “earnings stripping.” The practice involves reducing domestic taxable profits by claiming excessive interest deductions on intercompany loans from units abroad. Reuters [...]

Challenging financial times call for inspirational financial executives. Exactly what companies are looking for may depend on how the crisis is affecting them. One thing, however, has become clear: CFOs will be leaders in driving and implementing the strategies stemming from the economic turmoil, according to CFO.com. In a recent interview, Starwood CFO Vasant Prabhu [...]