Gary

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Report Your Income – Duh

Former Senator Tom Daschle, who was to head the Health and Human Services Department, had income that he didn’t report in a timely fashion. We are not talking one day’s tips from being a waiter, we are talking a 6-figure sum.

With the caveat that I am not a tax attorney or accountant, here’s the easy answer – Report all of your income. That’s right – report it all.

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Management of Your Most Important Asset: Yourself

Last week, there were reports that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was evaluating whether Apple violated the law in failing to disclose a material event – the apparently failing health of their CEO, Steve Jobs. I’ll let others evaluate this issue. However, it reminds me of an issue for the small business owner – your health.

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Should Small Businesses Use a Payroll Service? Thoughts for Minimizing Your Risks

There are many “vectors” pulling on the owner of a small business. You have to market the company, get the business, do the work, and get paid. The sales to payment cycle can be months long, during which you have to manage the cash flow to cover your costs and pay your employees or sub-contractors, before you can take money for yourself. One of the many non-billable tasks that you might de-prioritize are employment taxes…

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Small Business Owners: Back Up Your Data!

Perhaps you remember the episode of “Sex in the City” where Carrie Bradshaw turns on her Mac laptop, only to see the “Sad Mac”, indicating a serious hardware failure. This means that she cannot access any of her files. Her beau chastises her for not backing up her computer. She conjectures that backing up is a ritual for some strange secret society – because she has never done it and never heard about it…

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Thumbnail image for California: State Needs to Honor Committment to UC

California: State Needs to Honor Committment to UC

The UC Regents voted Wednesday to curtail undergraduate enrollment growth for Fall 2009. To many of us who knew then-UC President Clark Kerr and then-Gov. Pat Brown, developers of the 1960 master plan for higher education in California, this is a sad day. However, as a former UC regent, I cannot lay fault with either the UC Regents or UC President Mark Yudof…

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JPMorgan Conference: A Stream of Consciousness Report

The JPMorgan biomedical conference met at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco the week of 12 January. The opening event of the funding year, this conference serves as a bellwether of funding for biomedical firms for 2009. Even without name tags and the registration canvas totes, it’s easy to spot these “masters of the Universe” (thank you Tom Wolfe.) They are mostly Caucasian men dressed in suits, heads bowed in reading their Blackberry screens as they walk around Union Square with a paper coffee cup clad in its corrugated protector and plastic top…

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