Executive pay risk figures are a slippery, multi-faceted area for CFOs and chief risk officers.

From a compliance perspective, Dodd-Frank looms large. From a reputational risk standpoint, executive pay qualifies as a hot-button issue that generates major controversy – along with a stream of misperceptions – at least every 18 months.

There are also human capital risks involved with executive pay as well as more personal, career issues … at least for CFOs. more

Fifty community banks, from Alma Bank in Astoria, New York to Veritas Holdings, Inc. in Dallas, Texas, received nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in late August as part of the Small Business Lending Fund (SBLF), the U.S. Treasury Department announced. The latest announcement brings the total funding made available through the SBLF to about $1.8 billion, the Treasury reports.

The SBLF provides capital to banks with less than $10 billion in assets. Through the program, the dividend a bank pays for funds from Uncle Sam declines as it makes more loans to small businesses. The idea is that this will encourage banks to increase their lending.

Earlier in August, the Treasury also announced the approval of applications for State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) funding. The applications came from eleven states: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia, and the District of Columbia. more

If you believe the hype about VMworld 2011, the annual virtualization fest held by VMware, the leading distributed systems hypervisor company, you might think virtualization was poised to take over the world. OK, in some ways it is, at least the IT world anyway. CFOs should care because virtualization has the potential to save money and eliminate a lot they don’t like about conventional IT.

But VMworld wasn’t the only mega-event going on. Salesforce.com, the 900 lbs. gorilla in the SaaS industry, staged its annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco this same week. Dreamforce expects 45,000 attendees, better than doubling VMworld’s 20,000. Salesforce is using Dreamforce to rebrand itself as the social enterprise company on the basis of its cloud platform and how it leverages social, mobile, and open cloud technologies to change companies’ relationships with their customers. Dreamforce sponsors include the big consulting firms but few of the IT vendors.

Judging by the projected attendance at this year’s VMworld it clearly was one of the two places to be this final week of summer if you’re interested in IT. The list of corporate participants includes all the big names in technology—the ones not at Dreamforce–Cisco, EMC, HP, NetApp, CA, IBM, Intel, Symantec, and more; a veritable clash of titans. Here’s a sampling: more

According to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office, about 56 million citizens, or roughly one-sixth of the U.S. population, will receive some sort of Social Security benefit this year. More that two-thirds of the beneficiaries are retired workers and their family members. Social Security payments this year, at about $733 billion, currently account for about twenty percent of the federal budget. Nearly all – 97 percent – of Social Security’s income results from the 12.4 percent tax levied on salaries up to $106,800. (During 2011, the employee’s portion of the payroll tax was cut by two percent, from 6.2 to 4.2 percent, as this IRS notice explains. This was a result of the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010.)

Clearly, Social Security is an important source of income for many individuals. However, starting in 2010, the program’s outlays exceeded the revenue coming in. What’s more, at current rates of income and outflows, the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund will be exhausted by 2017, while the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will be exhausted in the year 2040. “Once a trust fund’s balance has fallen to zero and current revenues are insufficient to cover the benefits that are specified in law, the corresponding program will be unable to pay full benefits without changes in law,” according to the CBO report. more

Last week I was in Palo Alto visiting Professor Charles Horngren to congratulate him on the 50th anniversary of the publishing of his epic textbook Cost Accounting: A Managerial Emphasis (14th edition 2011, Prentice Hall: Boston, MA) . It has been the market leader since 1962. What is the secret to this book’s success? Let’s see what we can learn from Dr. Horngren.

One of the benefits of working with Dr. Horngren (who serves as the academic advisor to our Beyond Budgeting Round Table) is you get some insights into how he works. One way Dr. Horngren keeps his text alive is to always be learning. When I first invited him to participate in Best Practice research we were conducting on activity-based costing, I was only hoping that he would make time to provide some feedback on our summary report. Instead he joined us for five of the six site visits (the one he missed was due to a scheduled test he was giving that day but he took a red eye flight to be with us the following morning for the next site visit). more