Integrating Risk Management with Business Strategy, from BusinessFinanceMag on Vimeo.

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In today’s New York Times, Floyd Norris begins his “High & Low Finance” column by amplifying the question, “Did accounting help cause the financial crisis?” The column discusses the accounting treatment of structured investment vehicles (SIVs), a breed of assets that have much in common with that other tri-acronymic species of Enron fame: SPEs, or special-purpose entities. Like SPEs, SIVs have enjoyed the fruits of off-balance-sheet accounting, where companies get to bump assets from their books — thus removing them from the line of sight of investors. more

Most corporate tax pros, like business leaders in general, are looking forward to kissing 2009 good-bye with a huge sigh of relief. But there’s still time to score some tax savings for this year and get a jump on 2010. Here are a couple of year-end tax round-ups that can help. more

The House today passed a bill to extend the research tax credit for one year. While most business leaders would welcome the extension if it makes it through the Senate, small companies – currently in desperate need of a bit of tax relief — would have little to celebrate, judging by a report released Sunday by the Government Accountability Office. Big companies hog most of the tax break’s benefits, the GAO reveals. more

Smartphones — those slick cell phones capable of e-mail and Web browsing — are rapidly penetrating businesses. Managers everywhere, it seems, are turning up with Research in Motion’s Blackberry device. Increasingly, they also are showing up with Apple’s iPhone, a consumer device. Blackberry, however, remains the device of choice for business, at least for now.

A recent IDC study on mobile device adoption projects 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, which is expected to more than double by the end of 2013. The researchers estimate the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet to surpass the one billion mark over the next four years. Some of those likely will be you and your employees.

The increased use of mobile devices in business, not surprisingly, has led Gartner to organize webinars around what it refers to as enterprise mobile platforms. Here is a PowerPoint from one of those events. Gartner separately identified the top 10 mobile applications (below). Infonetics Research also has some interesting insights into the adoption of smartphones here.

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