#chief-accounting-officer

#chief-accounting-officer

What we want to do is make sure that CIOs are fully empowered to be there at the beginning of conversations, that they are part of the formulation of budget and policy from liftoff.

Most employer 401(k) plans allow mid-year changes to the deferral election percentage. Before the bonus pay period, raise the deferral rate high enough to funnel as much of the bonus as possible into the 401(k), up to the annual limit.

When you're working on CEO succession, with the clients we serve, there's less of a debate about whether people are qualified. It's much more about: 'Can they scale; can they adapt; can they evolve?' This reflects the fundamental shift in how organizations evaluate leadership potential in uncertain times.

"Tariffs are written in DC, and they're felt in the COO's inbox," Jason Schloetzer, a professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, told Business Insider. "It's kind of an impossible job."

CMOs sit at the apex of brand, revenue, customer experience, technology, product, sales and data. Yet they're spending less time in top jobs. The average tenure of a CMO at a Fortune 500 company is now just 3.9 years. Furthermore, fewer Fortune 500 companies are employing marketing executives who report at a C-suite level; these once all-important roles are being absorbed and redistributed to chief customer and chief growth officers.

Rather than stolen data making headlines, it was business stoppage that triggered attention. Moving into 2026, the board's focus should be on ensuring business continuity and building resilience in the face of emerging risks generated by AI usage and attack vectors, quantum computing and geopolitics.

As audit committees confront a rapidly expanding risk landscape, their role in corporate governance is being reshaped. Boards have often turned to current and former CFOs as independent directors, particularly for audit committees, because of their ability to translate complex operational and financial realities into effective oversight.For example, this month, J. Michael Hansen, former EVP and CFO of Cintas Corporation, was appointed to the audit committee at Paychex.

The emergence of so-called "agentic AI," systems that can perform tasks independently and support decisions, plays a central role in this. Two-thirds of respondents believe that there is currently more hype surrounding agentic AI than previous technological developments. At the same time, three-quarters are still discovering how this technology can be used effectively. According to Basware CEO Jason Kurtz, the time for experimentation is over; executives expect concrete results.

ADM announced on Tuesday that it has entered into a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to resolve its investigation into ADM's prior reporting of inter-segment sales, without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. As part of the settlement, ADM agreed to pay a $40 million penalty. According to the SEC, ADM engaged in years of profit-shifting that made its star nutrition segment appear to meet ambitious growth targets, even as demand softened and margins declined.

Good morning. During earnings calls this week, the CFOs of big tech companies, Meta and Microsoft, delivered a similar message: the AI race requires unprecedented capital spending, but that spending is disciplined, demand-driven, and ultimately margin-accretive rather than reckless. The companies urged investors to look past headline numbers and focus instead on utilization, long-term economics, and visible revenue traction.