Ten percent of CFOs surveyed during the summer said they expected to expand their teams in the final months of this year, with the most active hiring expected to take place in firms with 20 to 49 employees. Forty-four percent of CFOs who expected to hire in the fourth quarter cited business growth as the reason for hiring additional staff.

Twenty-eight percent of respondents said accounting positions were the most challenging to fill, while 22% said operational-support roles, such as those in accounts payable and collections, were the most difficult to staff.

Source: Robert Half International Financial Hiring Index, www.rhi.com.

Senior executives are getting hands-on when it comes to their company’s employee benefit plans.

In a recent survey of 125 employers by Cowden Associates, a Pittsburgh-based consulting and actuarial firm, 94% of respondents indicated their senior executives are involved in the investment decision-making process regarding employee 401(k) plans, up from 30% in 2007.

While improvements are being made in defined-contribution plan management, problem areas still exist. One-quarter of survey respondents reported not having an investment policy statement, which provides general investment goals and objectives of a retirement plan.

Source: Tri-State Defined Contribution Plan Sponsor Survey, Cowden Associates Inc., www.cowdenassociates.com.

Percentage of finance and accounting professionals who feel the uncertain economic climate is making their jobs more complex.

Source: The AICPA, www.aicpa.org.

Globalization of key back-office and business processes in finance is expected to see strong growth over the next three years, with companies predicted to increase their use of offshore resources by more than 50% in these areas.

The Hackett Group’s 2008 Globalization Performance Study, which surveyed almost 50 companies, most with revenue exceeding $5 billion, also found that globalization remains largely a cost-driven process. While process improvement, the ability to focus on the core business, and quality were all cited as “important” decision drivers, only cost was identified by the study group as being “very important.”

Source: The Hackett Group’s 2008 Globalization Performance Study, www.thehackettgroup.com.

According to an analysis by Compliance Week, the number of material weaknesses reported by large companies nosedived in 2007, largely due to SOX section 404 and improvements in internal control and the financial reporting community.

Compliance Week’s Material Weaknesses in Internal Control Over Financial Reporting analyzed 10-K and 10-K/A filings for 426 companies from the S&P 500. Of that group, 11 companies reported a total of 14 material weaknesses. The top problem areas included taxes (six reported weaknesses), financial procedures and personnel (two each), and revenue recognition and documentation (one each). The remaining two material weaknesses were considered in the area of “other accounting.”

Compliance Week performed the same analysis in 2006 with dramatically different results—nearly 900 material weaknesses were reported that year.

Source: www.complianceweek.com.

It’s no secret that human resource managers use electronic scanners and keyword searches of resumes to rank potential candidates. According to CareerBuilder.com, the terms employers search for most often are:

Problem-solving and decisionmaking skills (50%)

Oral and written communication 44%)

Customer service or retention (34%)

Performance and productivity improvement (32%)

Leadership (30%)

Technology (27%)

Team-building (26%)

Project management (20%)

Bilingual (14%)

Source: www.careerbuilder.com.

“When the investor wins, so does the public company, fund, or other filer who simultaneously benefits from greater transparency and trust in our markets. By tapping the power of interactive data…markets can become fairer and more efficient while investors can possess far better quality data than was ever possible before.” (See this month's “News Digest”)

—David Blaszkowsky, director of the SEC’s Office of Interactive Disclosure, Aug. 19

Source: www.sec.gov.

A Deloitte online poll found that two out of five executives felt data volumes in their organizations are becoming unmanageable.

Almost 20% of executives said their companies are not ready to handle complex discovery requests. Their greatest concerns about document discovery included:

Expensive vendor or in-house costs to go through large volumes of files (47.5%)

Damaged productions and exposure to sanctions due to error (16.3%)

Failure to meet court-set deadlines (12.9%)

According to Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, data volume in general doubles every 18 to 24 months.

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in December 2006 to require that companies can quickly access an inventory of electronically stored information in the event of litigation. Diane Barrasso, a principal in Deloitte’s Document Review Services practice, said in a release, “Courts appear to be appreciative of organizations and their counsel when the companies have implemented a standardized practice and written policies, practices and procedures that are utilized to govern discovery procedures. By implementing a policy of transparency internally, companies can effectively react to discovery requests…and significantly decrease errors when litigation arises.”

Source: Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, www.deloitte.com.

Nearly three out of 10 employers surveyed by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute had fired workers for e-mail misuse. The most-cited reasons included violation of company policy (64%), inappropriate or offensive language (62%), excessive personal use (26%) and breach of confidentiality rules (22%)

How are employers catching e-mail abusers? Of the 43% of companies in the survey that monitored e-mail, 73% used technology to automatically monitor it and 40% assigned an individual to manually read and review it.

The survey found that general computer monitoring took many forms, including:

Tracking content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard (45%)

Reviewing computer files (43%)

Monitoring external blogs to see what is being written about the company (12%)

Monitoring social networking sites (10%)

Source: 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey, American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, www.amanet.org and www.epolicyinstitute.com.

More than one quarter of large public companies are coming up short when it comes to FIN 48 disclosure requirements for tax reserves, with shortfalls the highest among airlines, electronic instruments and controls, insurance and energy companies, and regional banks.

The Seigel Tax Reserve Report covered first-quarter 2008 filings of more than 600 companies whose revenues exceeded $2 billion. J. Brad McGee, president of Seigel & Associates, said the greatest area of noncompliance was the “12-month lookforward rule,” where one of every eight companies provided no disclosure. The requirement concerns reporting tax positions that have a reasonable possibility of significant variation over the next 12 months.

Industries with the highest compliance levels included commodities, consumer financial and investment services, capital goods and money center banks.

Source: Seigel & Associates LLC, www.seigel-llc.com.

• Nearly one in four companies made or are considering changes to severance policies.
• More than 40% amended or are considering amending their change-in-control policies.
• A vast majority of companies set their targeted total pay and individual executive pay elements at or near the 50th percentile, bringing them more in line with their peers.

Source: Watson Wyatt, www.watsonwyatt.com.