Internal Controls

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Tax "Hacking" With Rupert Murdoch

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Press Baron Rupert Murdoch started with his father's newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, and built it into the world's second-biggest media empire. Time magazine has ranked him three times in their annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Vanity Fair routinely lists him in their "New Establishment" ranking of the 100 most influential people of the information age. And Forbes ranks him as one of the wealthiest men in the world, with an estimated net worth of $7.6 billion.

But now Murdoch's News Corporation is in hot water because reporters at Britain's News of the World tabloid illegally hacked into telephone voicemails across Britain. Since the scandal came to a boil, several company officials have resigned, others have been arrested, and the News of the World — which began publishing in 1843 when Queen Victoria ruled Britannia — has shut down.

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Protect Yourself From Invoice Scams

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Paying on phony invoices is an occupational risk for small businesses. They are regularly the target of scammers hoping to take advantage of sloppy bookkeeping, inattention on the part of employees and poor communications between the people in the firm ordering goods, those receiving them and those approving payment. All too often they are paid unwittingly along with a number of other routine bills.

Scammers have fake invoice production for such things as stationery or cleaning services, down to a fine art. Their invoice will include names (perhaps established by a prior phone call to the business for some innocuous seeming

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Private Use of Company Computers Puts Your Business at Risk

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As the use of computers becomes more built in to business operations employees naturally spend an increasing proportion of their time working at them. Working? Really? With temptations such as chat, streaming video, blogs, social networking and myriad other interesting sites (weather, maps, pornography, music, games, gambling, shopping, sports) it’s no wonder that surveys such as Websense’s annual Web@Work study reveal a depressing incidence of non-work related Web surfing by employees.

And its depressing not just because of the loss in productivity due to the amount of time wasted on such activities. These private activities, because they take place at the workplace using work computers, can entangle the business in legal prosecution cases related to their illegal use.