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Job dissatisfaction can be
all-consuming. If you’re lucky, it can also lead to promising new careers.
Here are some reasons why some people loathe their jobs:
• “Feeling undervalued is a huge one! Employees need to be appreciated.”
– Jan Addams
• “I think many people have been forced to take jobs that they don't love in order to maintain their lifestyle or stay in a location they like. I have highly overqualified candidates applying to positions every day that are several steps below their level.”
– Stephanie McDonald
• “They may love what they do, but in the end, they have no control over their own destiny (even if they are hard workers). This leads to frustration especially if they have to answer to people who make doing their job more difficult.”
– Steve Messineo
• “In my experience, people hate their jobs because they have little to no chance of a promotion no matter how well they do their jobs. Or they’re bored of their current position and are not allowed to change roles.”
– Dryw Vanderelburg
• “They do not feel included as being vital to the company's success. They do not fulfill their own self-interest through working on company goals.”
– Anita Pugh
• “Most people haven’t taken the time to find out who they are and what their purpose is on Earth. They are only working because they have to in order to live.”
– Ms. Odara
• “I believe that many individuals have a misconception of what level of happiness a job/career will bring to them. There are several factors that contribute to happiness in a person’s life, including family, leisure/recreation, and friends. Try to strike a balance with the other important things in life, and we just might see a change in our overall feeling about all aspects of our lives—including our jobs.”
– Kenny Bryant
• “Most of us have to settle for any ol’ job just so we can make ends meet. Also, sometimes doing what you love doesn't automatically equate to dollars.”
– Brittni Abiolu
Why do so many people hate their jobs? |
viernes, 11 de octubre de 2013
Por qué tanta gente odia su trabajo? Tomado de las Redes Sociales
The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store (BusinessWeek story)
By Brad Stone
Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. He is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, to be published in October by Little, Brown. Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.
The full article at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/cover-trail-the-secrets-of-bezos
Amazon.com rivals Wal-Mart as a store, Apple as a device maker, and IBM as a data services provider. It will rake in about $75 billion this year. For his book, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone spoke to hundreds of current and former friends of founder Jeff Bezos. In the process, he discovered the poignant story of how Amazon became the Everything Store.
Within Amazon.com (AMZN) there’s a certain type of e-mail that elicits waves of panic. It usually originates with an annoyed customer who complains to the company’s founder and chief executive officer. Jeff Bezos has a public e-mail address, jeff@amazon.com. Not only does he read many customer complaints, he forwards them to the relevant Amazon employees, with a one-character addition: a question mark.
When Amazon employees get a Bezos question mark e-mail, they react as though they’ve discovered a ticking bomb. They’ve typically got a few hours to solve whatever issue the CEO has flagged and prepare a thorough explanation for how it occurred, a response that will be reviewed by a succession of managers before the answer is presented to Bezos himself. Such escalations, as these e-mails are known, are Bezos’s way of ensuring that the customer’s voice is constantly heard inside the company.
One of the more memorable escalations occurred in late 2010. It had come to Bezos’s attention that customers who had browsed the lubricants section of Amazon’s sexual wellness category were receiving personalized e-mails pitching a variety of gels and other intimacy facilitators. When the e-mail marketing team received the question mark, they knew the topic was delicate and nervously put together an explanation. Amazon’s direct marketing tool was decentralized, and category managers could generate e-mail campaigns to customers who had looked at certain product categories but did not make purchases. The promotions tended to work; they were responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in Amazon’s annual sales. In the matter of the lubricant e-mail, though, a low-level product manager had overstepped the bounds of propriety. But the marketing team never got the chance to send this explanation. Bezos demanded to meet in person.
At Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, Jeff Wilke, the senior vice president for North American retail, Doug Herrington, the vice president for consumables, and Steven Shure, the vice president for worldwide marketing, waited in a conference room until Bezos glided in briskly. He started the meeting with his customary, “Hello, everybody,” and followed with “So, Steve Shure is sending out e-mails about lubricants.”
Bezos likes to say that when he’s angry, “just wait five minutes,” and the mood will pass like a tropical squall. Not this time. He remained standing. He locked eyes with Shure, whose division oversaw e-mail marketing. “I want you to shut down the channel,” he said. “We can build a $100 billion company without sending out a single f------ e-mail.”
An animated argument followed. Amazon’s culture is notoriously confrontational, and it begins with Bezos, who believes that truth shakes out when ideas and perspectives are banged against each other. Wilke and his colleagues argued that lubricants were available in supermarkets and drugstores and were not that embarrassing. They also pointed out that Amazon generated a significant volume of sales with such e-mails. Bezos didn’t care; no amount of revenue was worth jeopardizing customer trust. “Who in this room needs to get up and shut down the channel?” he snapped.
Eventually, they compromised. E-mail marketing would be terminated for certain categories such as health and personal care. The company also decided to build a central filtering tool to ensure that category managers could no longer promote sensitive products, so matters of etiquette were not subject to personal taste. For books and electronics and everything else Amazon sold, e-mail marketing lived to fight another day.
Amazon employees live daily with these kinds of fire drills. “Why are entire teams required to drop everything on a dime to respond to a question mark escalation?” an employee once asked at the company’s biannual meeting held at Seattle’s KeyArena, a basketball coliseum with more than 17,000 seats. “Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Wilke replied. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”
Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. He is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, to be published in October by Little, Brown. Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.
The full article at: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/cover-trail-the-secrets-of-bezos
lunes, 7 de octubre de 2013
Wharton Knowledge Newsletter
Una de las Escuelas de Negocios más reconocidas (Wharton) de la Univwersidad de Pennsylvania nos hace llegar estos interesantes temas, que pueden leer nuestros lectores y miembros:
1.- Innovación médica contra costos:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/medical-innovation-costs-outweigh-benefits/
2.- Los incentivos hacen crecer la industria fílmica en Latinoamérica:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lights-camera-action-government-incentives-latin-american-film-industry/
3.- Creatividad y Construcción de Negocios en la WEB:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/felicia-day-creativity-building-business-web/
1.- Innovación médica contra costos:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/medical-innovation-costs-outweigh-benefits/
2.- Los incentivos hacen crecer la industria fílmica en Latinoamérica:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lights-camera-action-government-incentives-latin-american-film-industry/
3.- Creatividad y Construcción de Negocios en la WEB:
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/felicia-day-creativity-building-business-web/
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
By Patrick Clark September 23, 2013
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
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.
The Honey Launderers: Uncovering the Largest Food Fraud in U.S. History
By Susan Berfield September 19, 2013
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.
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.
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.
Von Buddenbrock drove her to O’Hare, hugged her goodbye beside the curb, and got back in his car. It was late afternoon, the beginning of Memorial Day weekend, and he called his assistant to see if he needed to return to the office. While he was on the phone, an unmarked Chevy Impala drove up behind him. Officials shouted for him to pull over, arrested him, and drove him to a downtown Chicago courthouse where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, federal prosecutors, and his lawyer were waiting. About 20 minutes later, Giesselbach was brought in. She had been arrested before she checked in for her flight. “We were not allowed to talk, but I could see on her face that she was shocked,” says von Buddenbrock. “We were both in complete disbelief.”
Von Buddenbrock had also booked a flight to Germany for the following week; he planned to attend a friend’s wedding and return to Chicago. “I think that made the agents nervous,” he says. “At that point they didn’t know the complexity of the scheme. They probably thought No. 1 and No. 2 are leaving the country.”
He and Giesselbach were charged with conspiring to import honey from China that was mislabeled and adulterated. They were taken next door to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where they turned over their belongings, put on orange jumpsuits, and waited. “I was tense and nervous,” says von Buddenbrock. “But I managed to get along. I speak Spanish. I like soccer.” He played Monopoly with someone’s contraband dice. He got to know Joey Lombardo, the mafia boss. “He gave me a recommendation for an Italian restaurant.”
Back in Hamburg, Wolff told local newspaper Abendblatt: “The accusations against us are unfounded, and we will fight them with every legal means.”
On Monday, June 2, agents seized thousands more files from ALW’s office. Later that month, Giesselbach and von Buddenbrock were released after posting bond and continued to cooperate. “At first we didn’t have any clue how big it was,” says Gary Hartwig, the ICE special agent in Chicago in charge of the investigation.
“They were extremely sophisticated and intelligent in some ways, but so sloppy in other ways. What do they think—no one can translate German?”
ALW soon closed its U.S. operations and cut off contact with Giesselbach and von Buddenbrock. “ALW had such a nice scheme that functioned so well for a while,” says T. Markus Funk, an internal investigations and white-collar defense partner at Perkins Coie who was a federal prosecutor in Chicago when the ALW investigation began. “They were extremely sophisticated and intelligent in some ways, but so sloppy in other ways. What do they think—no one can translate German?”
In Germany, Giesselbach’s parents pleaded with ALW to help their daughter, but “the company cowardly abandoned their young employee without any help when she was in dire straits,” her father, Frank, says in an e-mail. One ICE agent called Giesselbach a marionette; the puppet master was Wolff. “I feel that Stefanie and Magnus got the rough end of the pineapple,” says Funk.
Giesselbach and von Buddenbrock each pleaded guilty to one count of fraud in the spring of 2012. According to Giesselbach’s plea agreement, between November 2006, when she arrived in Chicago, and May 2008, when she was arrested, as much as 90 percent of all honey imported into the U.S. by ALW was “falsely declared as to its country of origin.”
In February 2010, Wolff & Olsen, the century-old conglomerate that owned ALW, sold it to a Hamburg company called Norevo. According to an affidavit by one of the ICE agents, the sale was a sham; a former ALW executive assured customers in the U.S. by e-mail that after the sale was complete it would be “business as usual.” The transaction price was not disclosed. Norevo replied to a request for comment with a statement that had been posted on its website in March 2010. It concludes: “Within the frame of this acquisition, as legally required, the whole staff [of ALW] was taken over by Norevo, allowing for the business continuity of the company.”
Giesselbach went to jail. For one year and one day, she was Prisoner 22604-424 at Hazelton, a federal penitentiary in Bruceton Mills, W. Va. In a sentencing memo, Giesselbach’s lawyer wrote of his client: “She was living her youthful dream of international travel and business; under those circumstances she ignored her good judgment and went along with her predecessor’s scheme knowing it was wrong.” Giesselbach was released on Sept. 8 and is being deported. Von Buddenbrock was put under home confinement in Chicago for six months. His last day in an ankle bracelet was Friday, March 8. On the Monday after that, he self-deported. “I was relieved and happy, but I wasn’t sure what’s going to come,” he says. He’s settling back into life in Germany. “At the beginning it was a bad, lone wolf, so to speak,” he says. “Later, digging deeper the government found it was more than just ALW. A lot of people were doing it. It was an open secret.”
Giesselbach went to jail. For one year and one day, she was Prisoner 22604-424 at Hazelton, a federal penitentiary in Bruceton Mills, W. Va. In a sentencing memo, Giesselbach’s lawyer wrote of his client: “She was living her youthful dream of international travel and business; under those circumstances she ignored her good judgment and went along with her predecessor’s scheme knowing it was wrong.” Giesselbach was released on Sept. 8 and is being deported. Von Buddenbrock was put under home confinement in Chicago for six months. His last day in an ankle bracelet was Friday, March 8. On the Monday after that, he self-deported. “I was relieved and happy, but I wasn’t sure what’s going to come,” he says. He’s settling back into life in Germany. “At the beginning it was a bad, lone wolf, so to speak,” he says. “Later, digging deeper the government found it was more than just ALW. A lot of people were doing it. It was an open secret.”
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.
Berfield writes about retailers, restaurants, and other consumer companies for Bloomberg Businessweek.
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?
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)
Policy By Patrick Clark September 09, 2013
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
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