The Obama administration and the SBA may have tried recently to loosen small business lending through new legislation. But a new study shows they have a long ways to go to reach small companies-or even to get them to understand what the SBA does.

 A study from CIT Group, which surveyed more than 300 small business owners, found that around 50 percent of respondents didn't know what the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act was or how it might help their companies. The study was conducted before the bill was signed into law. Still, it's legislation you'd think small businesses would have noticed, since it does such things as eliminating borrowers' fees, raising the loan guarantee to 90 percent from 75 percent, and increasing loan limits.  It also creates a $30 billion lending fund to community banks.

The former chief financial officer of an Oklahoma energy company was sentenced to 16 years in prison for his role in a fraud.

David Grose, who served as CFO of Quest Energy Partners LP from 2004 to 2008, was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release upon his release from prison, forfeit $1 million in assets, and pay $1 million in restitution to the company.

The Delaware Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling that would have made it easier for would-be hostile acquirers to wrest control of a company's board of directors.

The ruling is also a blow to Air Products and Chemicals, which has been trying to take over Airgas. At Airgas' annual meeting in September, Air Products elected its slate of three directors to the Airgas board and tried to circumvent Airgas' classified board by proposing a bylaw amendment that would have allowed it to elect three more directors to the board in January--just four months after the 2009 annual meeting.

Although chief financial officers, risk managers, and other corporate executives recognize the importance of strategic risk management, many are as yet unable to put it into full practice and linking it effectively with overall corporate strategy is a still-elusive goal.

One of the latest offshoots of socially responsible investing is called impact investing. It's aimed at creating investments with a social and/or environmental impact, as well as financial returns. To that end, it seeks to differentiate itself from traditional socially responsible investing, by focusing on enterprises that actively seek to do good, rather than those that merely avoid doing harm. That means businesses, for example, providing customers with access to water or housing or creating quality jobs. In a short time, it's attracted the interest of everyone from major financial institutions and pension funds to foundations, commercial banks, family offices, and wealth managers. The list includes such heavy-hitters as Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Prudential Financial.

 But as I wrote recently, one of the big questions about impact investing is just what kind of returns you can get. Now a new report from JP Morgan, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Global Impact Investing Network, provides at least some preliminary answers. The first large-scale data analysis of return expectations, it includes comparisons to established benchmarks for emerging and developed market debt and equity returns with data on over 1,100 investments. And it provides an estimate for potential returns and total investment opportunity over the next 10 years.

This blog has long contended that one of the benefits of the financial crisis is that governments around the world are bending over backwards to improve the conditions in which private sector companies do business. On Monday we reported on the UN's Doing Business report which corroborated this view with comprehensive figures from around the world.

But it is not just emerging markets. The UK's new coalition government has made being business friendly a cornerstone of its economic policy from the day it came to power last May. A new tax rule announced on Monday shows how serious the government is in not only attracting new companies into the country but also in persuading British companies to stay and not move to lower tax jurisdictions as so many have already done.

As portrayed by its opponents, the reinstatement of the estate tax could lead to the demise of small businesses across the country. "The estate tax falls hardest on those who maintain a family business, often forcing family business owners to sell the business in order to pay the tax," according to the website, www.nodeathtax.org.  

The numbers tell a slightly different story. According to a 2009 report from the Congressional Budget Office, the 17,400 taxable estate tax returns filed in 2007 (for 2006), represented .7 percent of adult deaths that year. About 2.1 percent of farmers and 2.4 percent of small business owners who died in 2005 had to file estate tax returns, the CBO reports. Of those, almost all had sufficient liquid assets to pay the tax, particularly considering that heirs can spread payments over 15 years.

It may not be as sexy as the latest iPhone or iPad apps, but Google is reaching out to small businesses with a new range of finance and management apps geared specifically at SMEs, and have promised to launch new small company tools each Tuesday.

In its first release, companies can take advantage of accounting and finance app Outright, which provides automated data gathering from various external sources, such as banks and payments service providers, like Paypal.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's aggressive crackdown on illegal insider trading has snared a former Deloitte Tax LLP partner and his wife.

The pair on Tuesday was accused with repeatedly leaking confidential merger and acquisition information to family members overseas in what the regulator calls a multi-million dollar insider trading scheme.

The SEC alleges that Arnold McClellan, head of one of Deloitte's regional mergers and acquisitions teams, and his wife Annabel provided advance notice of at least seven acquisitions planned by Deloitte's clients to Annabel's sister and brother-in-law in London. The brother-in-law then took positions in US companies that were targets of acquisitions by Arnold McClellan's clients.

For companies with European operations, a series of resolutions by the European Central Bank's (ECB) Gertrude Tumpel-Gugerell addressed electronic payments management within and to the region, among other things.

At the Next Generation Cards & Payments Conference in Brussels Tumpel-Gugerell outlined a number of goals for 2011 that she said were essential to the success of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)—the EC’s push for standardized payment infrastructure and regulations across the EU. Among the points she cited were the need for improved security and innovation in the online payments markets.