Waypoints: Ideas and Insights to Navigate Enterprise Complexity

If you commission regular audits of your company, you know the purpose of an effective audit is to deliver both an appropriate audit opinion and an opinion in which your shareholders and other stakeholders have confidence.  Many, if not most, accounting firms can provide that.  So what differentiates one audit firm from another, and how should you assess the quality of your audit? 

The HORNE PMM team has been sharing its insights and ideas for a little more than six months, and we hope we’ve provided you with a valuable resource. Sometimes we write about emerging trends, sometimes we write about what we’ve learned, and sometimes we write about issues that can keep your company out of trouble.

In my July blog, I wrote about the likelihood of meaningful tax reform, possibly in 2017. The premise was that such an undertaking is long overdue, and the context was that political reality still will make it exceedingly difficult to accomplish.

Fall is just around the corner, and as a chief financial officer, it’s not too soon to start thinking about the challenges your business will face in 2016.

It has been 29 years since the last major rewrite of the Internal Revenue Code.  That effort in 1986 was preceded by one in 1954, a 32-year interval.  If we are to see another one, it could happen in 2017 or 2018, interestingly also nearly an identical interval.

Describing today’s business environment as complex is an understatement. In fact, a recent survey showed that four out of five CFOs rank internal complexity as the number one challenge facing their organizations. Adding the ever-evolving external factors impacting your business increases the challenge even more. Yet, you are asked to manage and succeed in just such an environment, and the risks are often huge.