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At the heart of risk management is a gloomy truth: You can never achieve zero risk. In a world of limited resources there are always tradeoffs to be made: how much to invest here and how much there, how much risk to tolerate and how much to mitigate or insure against. To answer those questions, risk quantification is necessary—to estimate how...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the recent taxpayer victory in the U.S. Tax Court’s Lender Management, LLC decision have created important planning opportunities for closely held and family-controlled entities in 2018. In particular, with respect to: (1) navigating the elimination of the various deductions and the expansion of “bo...

A family office is more than a cost-effective solution to managing great wealth. When done properly, it provides customized services and support that fosters a shared experience of wealth stewardship. Establishing a family office should be approached the same way as creating any other successful business: start with a good plan.

Now that The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the Act) has been signed into law, you may be wondering what this means for you and your family. The Act is broad in scope and will change the tax rules for individuals and businesses in 2018 and beyond. When thinking about the impact of the Act on you, your family, and your business, it’s important to reme...

Due diligence often focuses heavily on financial and operational issues. Often the new or combined organization’s cybersecurity does not receive the attention it deserves. As a result it places the company at risk from a cyber incident, which can detrimentally impact the organization’s reputation and financial security. The risk is high...

Cyber risk has moved from the IT department to a full-fledged enterprise risk. Unfortunately, a cyberattack can hit a company at any time. There are, however, practical, actionable steps to ensure that when a cyberattack hits, your company and board will be both ready to address the threat and resilient enough to recover from it. Leveraging a flexi...

Financial reports and other real-time operational data are often lagging indicators of performance. These metrics, although perhaps lacking precision, may have been sufficiently effective in the past; however, they are less so now because they lag the current cadence of information dissemination and business volatility today. The challenge for many...

For American companies who do business in Europe or who process the personal data of EU residents, the world of data privacy and security is about to get much more complicated. While U.S. privacy law is unsettled, with rapidly proliferating state and federal laws and regulations and uncertainty as to how strictly they will be enforced, the rules in...

Vulnerability assessments and penetration testing may uncover areas where hackers can break in, but what if they are already there? Cyber Hunting is a proactive strategy to identify if anyone is already on your network versus waiting for an actual breach to occur. Most breaches occur weeks or even months after the attacker gets a foothold on the ne...

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies are becoming more and more popular, and with good reason. As the capabilities of tablets and smartphones continue to rapidly expand, the mobility revolution has been a boon for businesses and employees alike, enabling greater productivity and more flexibility. BYOD amplifies those efficiency gains, reducing adm...

In the last few years, hackers and cyber criminals have become much more sophisticated in how they steal private information, which has led to massive data breaches. These data breaches not only cost an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in fixes and possible fines, they can ruin a long-established reputation in a matter of hours. Puttin...

So, you need to hire someone to work at your home—a housekeeper, a chef, or a personal assistant. You have decided not to contract these services to a local company, and your family office does not hire staff for you. It is up to you to fill this position. Before letting a stranger into your home, it is important to understand the domestic em...

Flash drives and laptops may pose a threat to company security as employees take confidential information outside the office, according to a survey from Tower Software. The U.K.-based company found that 55 percent of surveyed employees store work-related e-mails, files and documents in locations other than a secure, shared computer network.

Staff recruitment, hiring and retention are challenging and diffi cult processes for any employer. When this task is assumed by a family, many of the standard issues raised are magnifi ed because of the family's limited experience in this job capacity. When you take on the role of employer, risk management changes in many ways. Despite the conc...

Two notices from Withers Worldwide discuss changes to U.S. tax rules in the deferred remuneration area that take effect on 1 January 2009. These rules (found in Sections 409A and 457A of the U.S. tax code) target deferred payments that do not satisfy complex technical requirements, imposing a compliance burden on non-U.S. as well as U.S. employers....