jueves, 26 de septiembre de 2013

Small Business : El Estado de Nueva York contra los falsificadores de opiniones en Internet

Marketing

New York State Cracks Down on Fake Online Reviews

                                                                                                             
 
New York State Cracks Down on Fake Online Reviews
 
Every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker who has ever contemplated the dark arts of online reputation management should take note: The seemingly benign practice of posting fake business reviews isn’t so benign these days.
 
A month ago Yelp (YELP), sued a San Diego lawyer for planting fake reviews about his solo practice in California state court. Today, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a deal with 19 businesses that agreed to stop writing fake reviews and pay more than $350,000 in penalties. Yelp and Schneiderman, powerful players stooping to take on local business owners, each asserted that posting fake reviews violates false advertising laws.
 
Schneiderman’s announcement today about the state’s yearlong investigation is bizarre. State investigators pretended to be the owners of a fictitious Brooklyn yogurt shop in order to nab a handful of search engine optimization companies that posted positive reviews for clients. The attorney general also entered into agreements with an odd assortment of real local businesses, including a teeth-whitening boutique, several laser hair removal spas, a strip club franchise, and a charter bus company.

“This investigation into large-scale, intentional deceit across the Internet tells us that we should approach online reviews with caution,” says Schneiderman in a statement. It shouldn’t have taken a yearlong investigation to figure that out: As the attorney general’s press release points out, a year-old Gartner study predicts that 10 percent to 15 percent of reviews will be fake by 2014.
 
There’s good reason to try to game the system. Research generally indicates that people place faith in consumer reviews, buying from businesses that appear to be well liked. That presents a predicament for such companies as Yelp and Angie’s List (ANGI) that want to be known for providing trustworthy recommendations, as well as government officials charged with protecting consumers.
 
Customers are vulnerable to being duped. Because bogus reviews are effective, lots of businesses are planting fakes. As Schneiderman points out, there’s even a cottage industry of companies that specialize in getting planted reviews past algorithmic filters and employing freelancers from far-flung locales such as Bangladesh and the Philippines to write positive notes.
 
Suing violators is hardly scalable, and computer algorithms are probably a better bet than undercover prosecutors for sniffing out bogus reviews. That doesn’t mean small business owners—many of whom already feel antagonized by local reviews sites—shouldn’t heed the recent lawsuits. Lawsuits alone may never stop companies from posting fake reviews, but no business owner wants to get stung.

Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek covering small business and entrepreneurship.

lunes, 23 de septiembre de 2013

Lavadores de Miel: El mayor fraude alimenticio de la Historia Noprteamericana (BusinessWeek)

 Features

The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History


The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History
 
Photograph by Jamie Chung for Bloomberg Businessweek
 
Magnus von Buddenbrock and Stefanie Giesselbach arrived in Chicago in 2006 full of hope. He was 30, she was 28, and they had both won their first overseas assignments at ALW Food Group, a family-owned food-trading company based in Hamburg. Von Buddenbrock had joined ALW—the initials stand for its founder, Alfred L. Wolff—four years earlier after earning a degree in marketing and international business, and he was expert in the buying and selling of gum arabic, a key ingredient in candy and soft drinks.
 
Giesselbach had started at ALW as a 19-year-old apprentice. She worked hard, learned quickly, spoke five languages, and within three years had become the company’s first female product manager. Her specialty was honey. When the two colleagues began their new jobs in a small fourth-floor office a few blocks from Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, ALW’s business was growing, and all they saw was opportunity.
 
On March 24, 2008, von Buddenbrock came to the office around 8:30 a.m., as usual. He was expecting a quiet day: It was a holiday in Germany, and his bosses there had the day off. Giesselbach was on holiday, too; she had returned to Germany to visit her family and boyfriend. Sometime around 10 a.m., von Buddenbrock heard a commotion in the reception area and went to have a look. A half-dozen armed federal agents, all wearing bulletproof vests, had stormed in. “They made a good show, coming in with full force,” he recalls. “It was pretty scary.”
 
The agents asked if anybody was hiding anywhere, then separated von Buddenbrock and his assistant, the only two employees there. Agents brought von Buddenbrock into a conference room, where they questioned him about ALW’s honey business. After a couple of hours they left, taking with them stacks of paper files, copies of computer hard drives, and samples of honey.
 
Giesselbach returned from Germany three days later. Her flight was about to land at O’Hare when the crew announced that everyone would have to show their passports at the gate. As Giesselbach walked off the plane, federal agents pulled her aside. She, too, answered their questions about ALW’s honey shipments. After an hour, they let her leave. The agents, from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security, had begun to uncover a plot by ALW to import millions of pounds of cheap honey from China by disguising its origins.
 
 
Americans consume more honey than anyone else in the world, nearly 400 million pounds every year. About half of that is used by food companies in cereals, bread, cookies, and all sorts of other processed food. Some 60 percent of the honey is imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and other trading partners. Almost none comes from China. After U.S. beekeepers accused Chinese companies of selling their honey at artificially low prices, the government imposed import duties in 2001 that as much as tripled the price of Chinese honey. Since then, little enters from China legally.
 
Von Buddenbrock and Giesselbach continued to cooperate with the investigators, according to court documents. In September 2010, though, the junior executives were formally accused of helping ALW perpetuate a sprawling $80 million food fraud, the largest in U.S. history. Andrew Boutros, assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago, had put together the case: Eight other ALW executives, including Alexander Wolff, the chief executive officer, and a Chinese honey broker, were indicted on charges alleging a global conspiracy to illegally import Chinese honey going back to 2002. Most of the accused executives live in Germany and, for now, remain beyond the reach of the U.S. justice system. They are on Interpol’s list of wanted people. U.S. lawyers for ALW declined to comment.

In the spring of 2006, as Giesselbach, who declined requests for an interview, was preparing for her job in Chicago, she started receiving e-mail updates about various shipments of honey moving through ports around the world. According to court documents, one on May 3 was titled “Loesungmoeglichkeiten,” or “Solution possibilities.” During a rare inspection, U.S. customs agents had become suspicious about six shipping containers of honey headed for ALW’s customers. The honey came from China but had been labeled Korean White Honey.
 
 
The broker, a small-time businessman from Taiwan named Michael Fan, had already received advice from ALW about how to get Chinese honey into the U.S. ALW executives had told him to ship his honey in black drums since the Chinese usually used green ones. And they had reminded him that the “taste should be better than regular mainland material.” Chinese honey was often harvested early and dried by machine rather than bees. This allowed the bees to produce more honey, but the honey often had an odor and taste similar to sauerkraut. Fan was told to mix sugar and syrup into the honey in Taiwan to dull the pungent flavor.
 
After Fan’s honey shipment was confiscated, an ALW executive wrote to Giesselbach and her colleagues: “I request that all recipients not to write e-mail about this topic. Please OVER THE TELEPHONE and in German! Thank you!”
 
Nonetheless, Giesselbach and executives in Hamburg, Hong Kong, and Beijing continued to use e-mail for sensitive discussions about the mislabeled honey. When Yan Yong Xiang, an established honey broker from China they called the “famous Mr. Non Stop Smoker,” was due to visit Chicago, Giesselbach received an e-mail. “Topic: we do not say he is shipping the fake stuff. But we can tell him that he should be careful on this topic + antibiotics.” E-mails mention falsifying reports from a German lab, creating fake documents for U.S. customs agents, finding new ways to pass Chinese honey through other countries, and setting up a Chinese company that would be eligible to apply for lower tariffs. Giesselbach comes across as accommodating, unquestioning, and adept.
 
ALW relied on a network of brokers from China and Taiwan, who shipped honey from China to India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea, Mongolia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The 50-gallon drums would be relabeled in these countries and sent on to the U.S. Often the honey was filtered to remove the pollen, which could help identify its origin. Some of the honey was adulterated with rice sugar, molasses, or fructose syrup.
 
In a few cases the honey was contaminated with the residue of antibiotics banned in the U.S. In late 2006 an ALW customer rejected part of Order 995, three container loads of “Polish Light Amber,” valued at $85,000. Testing revealed one container was contaminated with chloramphenicol, an antibiotic the U.S. bans from food. Chinese beekeepers use chloramphenicol to prevent Foulbrood disease, which is widespread and destructive. A deal was made to sell the contaminated honey at a big discount to another customer in Texas, a processor that sold honey to food companies. According to court documents, ALW executives called Honey Holding the “garbage can” for the company’s willingness to buy what others would not. Giesselbach followed up with Honey Holding, noting “quality as discussed.” The contaminated container was delivered on Dec. 14, 2006.
 
Von Buddenbrock’s introduction to the honey-laundering scheme came months after he’d settled into Chicago. In the spring of 2007 he was getting ready to take over the U.S. operation from a university friend, Thomas Marten. They talked about the business every other week for a couple of hours over dinner. One night at an Italian restaurant near their office, Marten told von Buddenbrock about ALW’s mislabeling Chinese honey to avoid the high tariffs. “The conversation started normally,” says von Buddenbrock. “Then he started talking about honey. I always took notes in all our meetings, and I tried to take notes then. He told me I shouldn’t. I was surprised and a bit shocked about what I was hearing. We were talking about something criminal, and some people imagine meeting undercover, in a shady garage.” They were out in the open, eating pasta. Marten could not be reached for comment.
 
Von Buddenbrock took over from Marten in August 2007. The raid on the ALW office on North Wabash Avenue occurred seven months later, after U.S. honey producers had warned Commerce and Homeland Security that companies might be smuggling in cheap Chinese honey. Low prices made them suspicious. So did the large amount of honey suddenly coming from Indonesia, Malaysia, and India—more, in total, than those countries historically produced.
 
Although the illicit honey never posed a public health threat, the ease with which the German company maneuvered suggests how vulnerable the food supply chain is to potential danger. “People don’t know what they’re eating,” says Karen Everstine, a research associate at the National Center for Food Protection and Defense. The honey business is only one example of an uncontrolled market. “We don’t know how it works, and we have to know how it works if we want to be able to identify hazards.”
 
After they were questioned in March 2008, von Buddenbrock and Giesselbach continued to work for ALW. “We didn’t know what direction this was going to go,” says von Buddenbrock. “I was considering leaving, but I thought this might actually be a good opportunity for me.” If ALW got out of the honey business, he could focus on selling the products he knew more about. The ALW executives in Hamburg, he notes, kept in touch by e-mail but for obvious reasons no longer traveled to the U.S. Giesselbach, meanwhile, arranged to return to ALW’s Hamburg office; it’s not clear if she was being sent home by the company. Her flight to Germany was on Friday, May 23.
 
“They were extremely sophisticated and intelligent in some ways, but so sloppy in other ways. What do they think—no one can translate German?”
A second phase of the investigation began in 2011, when Homeland Security agents approached Honey Holding, ALW’s “garbage can,” and one of the biggest suppliers of honey to U.S. food companies. In “Project Honeygate,” as agents called it, Homeland Security had an agent work undercover for a full year as a director of procurement at Honey Holding.

In February 2013, the Department of Justice accused Honey Holding, as well as a company called Groeb Farms and several honey brokers, of evading $180 million in tariffs. Five people pleaded guilty to fraud, including one executive at Honey Holding, who was given a six-month sentence. Honey Holding and Groeb Farms entered into deferred prosecution agreements, which require them to follow a strict code of conduct and to continue cooperating with the investigation.

When it announced the deferred prosecution agreement, Groeb Farms, which is based in Onsted, Mich., said it dismissed two executives who created fake documents and lied to the board of directors even as the company’s own audits raised concerns that honey was being illegally imported. “Everything we are doing at Groeb Farms this year has been to ensure the integrity of our supply chain,” Rolf Richter, the company’s new CEO, said via e-mail. Groeb Farms paid a $2 million fine.

In a statement on its website, Honey Holding says it accepted full responsibility and that in its settlement “there will be neither admission of guilt nor finding of guilt.” The company, now called Honey Solutions, is paying its $1 million fine in installments.

Susan-berfield-photo-200x200
Berfield writes about retailers, restaurants, and other consumer companies for Bloomberg Businessweek.
Follow her on Twitter @susanberfield

viernes, 20 de septiembre de 2013

Taxes: El IRS persigue menos contribuyentes que antes... (BusinessWeek)

The IRS Hasn't Been Going After as Many Taxpayers as Before. Why?

 

Taxes

The IRS Hasn't Been Going After as Many Taxpayers as Before. Why?


There’s a bit of good news today for IRS haters. Congress has been starving the agency of funds for the last three years, Bloomberg News‘ Richard Rubin reports. And that rationing has had a direct impact on the IRS’s policing of taxpayers. 
The IRS’s budget took almost a 3 percent hit from fiscal years 2010 to 2012, according to a just-released report (PDF) from the inspector general for the Treasury Department. The cuts forced the IRS to trim 8,000 full-time workers from its rolls, 5,000 of whom were auditors. Those layoffs amounted to a 14 percent reduction in the agency’s enforcement staff, which caused the money that the IRS collects through audits to fall off by 13 percent.
 
 
So did this cause the IRS to choose its targets differently? Yes. A few interesting take-aways:
 
• Policing of corporations jumped 15 percent, compared to 2009. One in 61 corporate returns went under the IRS’s magnifying glass last year. And over the past five years, audits of businesses with assets of $50 million to $250 million increased by more than 77 percent.
• S corporations and partnerships are getting more scrutiny. The IRS audited 1 in 206 S corporations in fiscal 2012, compared to 1 in 270 in fiscal 2010—that’s a 33 percent jump. Meanwhile, the number of returns filed by partnerships that the IRS audited between fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2012 increased 35 percent.
• Audits of individuals fell from 2011 and 2012. Last year the agency audited 1 in 97 individual returns.
 
• And the IRS let more estate tax returns slide through without a closer look. It audited 10 percent fewer of those returns last year.
 
There’s no way to know whether those particular trends will continue. The agency’s ability to crack down on delinquent taxpayers will probably be hampered. One big factor: budget squabbles in Congress. Republicans in the House want to chop 24 percent from the agency’s 2014 budget; President Obama wants to pad the budget by 9 percent. Plus the sheer complexity of the IRS’s mission keeps increasing. It is responsible for enforcing 50 provisions in Obamacare and hasn’t received additional funding from Congress for the task, according to the Treasury inspector general. And the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act earlier this year piled even more work onto the IRS’s proverbial plate.
 
Hinman is an associate editor for Bloomberg Businessweek.
 
 


jueves, 12 de septiembre de 2013

The Case for Teaching Entrepreneurship in High School Small Business from BusinessWeek)

The New Entrepreneur

Policy    By                           

There’s no question that entrepreneurship education is hot. There were 20 times as many college courses on entrepreneurship in 2008 as there were in 1985, according to the Kauffman Foundation, and nearly 400,000 college students (pdf) take classes on the subject each year.
 
Whether entrepreneurship is something that should be taught in college, and whether the training is effective, are two questions that remain up for debate. Here are two more: Should high schools teach entrepreneurship? To what end?
 
New research from the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) argues that the benefits of teaching young people how to launch and run a business extend beyond developing the next generation of world-changing entrepreneurs.
 
NFTE has provided courses in entrepreneurship to more than 500,000 students, mostly from low-income middle schools and high schools, since the organization was founded in 1987. Recently, the nonprofit surveyed about 1,300 alumni of its entrepreneurship programs—which include courses taught throughout the school year as well as summer camps and often culminate in business plan competitions.
 
The findings: Students who completed a NFTE program were doing better at educational achievement than the population at large:
 
• 99 percent of alumni over the age of 25 have a high school diploma, compared with 85 percent of the larger population.
• The high school dropout rate for NFTE alumni between the ages of 16 and 19 was 1 percent, compared with a national average of 3.4 percent.
• Half of NFTE alumni who graduated from college earned degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math. Forty-seven percent of NFTE grads with STEM degrees were African American, more than six times the national rate. Fifty-one percent of NFTE alumni in the survey were African American.
 
“Kids are making decisions when they’re 12 or 13 that will destine them to poverty,” says NFTE’s chief executive, Amy Rosen. “The question is: Can you change the trajectory of a kid’s life in one year-long course by getting them involved in their work? I’ve seen over and over again that you can.”
Clark is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek covering small business and entrepreneurship

jueves, 5 de septiembre de 2013

What Small Businesses Need to Do for Obamacare Before Oct. 1

(Consejos tomados de BusinessWeek)    By   

Sara Getahun pours soy wax into Indian containers at Himalayan Handmade Candles in Decatur, Georgia on Aug. 13

The health insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act will open on Oct. 1. Most small employers—those with 50 or fewer full-time employees—are not required to offer health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Even businesses with more than 50 full-time employees have gotten a one-year reprieve from penalties if they don’t offer insurance. But all companies, regardless of size, are required to notify their employees about the Obamacare marketplaces.
 
The state and federal insurance exchanges are websites on which individuals and small businesses can shop for health plans. Though the deadline is less than a month away, many small businesses don’t know they have to notify employees, says Keith McMurdy, a benefits partner in the law firm of Fox Rothschild in New York. He has spoken to dozens of small business groups around the country in the past year and says most small business owners are unaware of the requirement or are under the misconception that it doesn’t apply to them because they’re too small to be governed by the health-care reform law’s mandate. McMurdy says it’s not clear how the requirement will be enforced, but penalties for businesses that don’t comply could reach $100 per worker per day.
 
“An employer with 10 employees typically says, ‘I don’t have to worry about it, because I don’t have to offer insurance.’ A lot of them are going to miss the deadline and be unpleasantly surprised when they do,” he says. The notification requirement applies to any business regulated under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which covers all companies with at least one employee and $500,000 in annual revenue. “There are no exceptions for small employers, which means nearly everybody has to get out this notice to their employees. We have been getting a lot of questions about it from small business owners,” says John Barlament, a lawyer in the employee benefits group at Quarles & Brady in Milwaukee.
 
The U.S. Department of Labor has posted information about the notification requirement on its website and has provided model notices that can be used both by employers who offer insurance (PDF) and by those who do not offer insurance (PDF).
 
The one- to three-page model notices can be downloaded, filled out, and printed, either for distribution in the office or for mailing to employees’ homes, McMurdy says. Employees who come on board after Oct. 1 must get the notice within 14 days of their start date with the company. “People ask me what’s the safest way to do this, and I always say, if the government gives you a model, use it. Or make yourself a comparable form, modified the way you need it, and use that. The safest route is to put it in the U.S. mail or follow the instructions for distributing it electronically,” he says. “The employer obligation is met at that point. I don’t see any requirement that you have to get signatures saying your employees have received it or maintain proof of the fact that you gave it out.”
 
The second and third pages of the model notices are optional, Barlament says. He is encouraging his small business clients to include the upper portion of page 2, which describes the insurance coverage provided by the company, but to leave off the rest of that page and page 3, which he feels could be confusing.
 
Sending out this notice is another in a long list of compliance issues for business owners around the ACA, McMurdy says, and most that he speaks with resent the extra work. However, he is starting to sense “general acceptance of the misery” and is hearing more employers say they expect to get used to the major provisions of the law when they go into effect next year. “It’s kind of like when COBRA came in and business owners said, ‘This will kill us, this is insane,’ and before long they got used to the idea.”
Karen_klein
Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

Herramientas de Trabajo para los Negocios (Tomado de TechRepublic)

Cuando un negocio empieza a crecer necesita herramientas especificas para organizar sus recursos, mejorar su desempeño y mantener la clientela satisfecha. Dependiendo del área aquí hay varias propuestas:

1. Orange HRM

Orange HRM is clearly the leader in human resource management. This powerful open source system is used by over a million companies world-wide and offers features like: Employee information management, employee absence management, recruitment management, employee performance evaluation, employee self-service, and other HR-specific management tools. Orange HRM is an ideal system for small to medium sized businesses looking to give their human resource department the power to manage all aspects of employees from a single, web-based portal. And since Orange HRM is modular, you can add and remove modules as needed. Should you need support for Orange HRM, you can choose from one of their support plans.

a1_orange_1.png

2. Process Maker

Process Maker is a system that helps you improve the workflow performance. By analyzing inefficiencies and bottlenecks, Process Maker will build specific and in-depth reports to help you fine tune how your business runs. Process Maker also allows you to set up automated notifications and offers an easy to use web-based interface. And with the Dynaform Builder, you can create specific forms focused on improving the workflow between employees, departments, and more. With a drag-and-drop interface, Process Maker offers a user-friendly experience that just about any HR staff member can get up to speed with (so long as they have an understanding of report and form building).

b1_process_maker_1.png

3. Phreedom

Phreedom is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that allows the small business to enjoy some of the same tools enterprise-level businesses employ. With this virtual appliance you can: Track inventory, manage accounting and contracts, handle check writing, do bank account reconciliation, and much more. Although Phreedom offers much more than most small businesses need, it is a superb means of tracking resources within your company to help build a much more reliable and efficient workflow. Phreedom also offers a plug-in system that allows you expand beyond the standard capability.

c1_phreedom_1.png

4. vTiger

vTiger is specific for Customer Relationship Management. The vTiger platform offers features like: Phone and e-mail integration, analysis and reporting, customer support with self-service portal, marketing/sales automation for campaigns, lead generation, billing/inventory management, Google integration, and much more. With vTiger you empower your sales force with a collaboration tool that will make their entire process far more streamlined.

d1_vtiger_1.png

5. Zurmo

Zurmo is another Customer Relationship Manager - with a twist. Zurmo claims to be the first social and "gamified" CRM. What that means is that users gain rewards for milestones. But don't let the "schtick" fool you, Zurmo still offers all the usual features found in other, powerful CRM tools. The Zurmo feature set includes: Contact management, activity management, deal tracking, reporting, workflow, marketing automation, product management, resetful API, Google Mapping integration, and more. Zurmo also offers security with role management/groups/permissions/ad-hoc teams. And since Zurmo is open source, it can be expanded to perfectly fit your company's needs.

e1_zurmo_1.png