Diversions August 22, 2007

Generation Gaps

They have never rolled down a car window, never known a time when the Berlin Wall stood, and never seen anyone but Jay Leno host the Tonight Show.
Reported by
No, we’re not talking about hermits, or some kind of Austin Powers secret agent cryogenically frozen in 1967. We’re talking about the class of 2011—the freshmen that have, or soon will, arrive on college campuses in the upcoming weeks.
Their perspective has once again been captured by Beloit College in Wisconsin, which has for the past decade released the Beloit College Mindset List. Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities, Tom McBride, and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief.
Latchkey kids for most of their lives, students entering college this fall think nothing of arriving home alone; and, these days, they accept as normal discourse e-mailing or texting their friends, and updating their summer vacation exploits on “Facebook’ or “MySpace,’ (a word of insight—if you want to keep up with what is REALLY going on with your teenager, get an account on one of those two social networks).
For the incoming freshman class, Humvees (minus the artillery) have always been available to the public, they have grown up with bottled water, and General Motors has always been working on an electric car. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.
“Off the hook’ has never had anything to do with a telephone, and music has always been “unplugged.’ Meanwhile, MTV has never featured music videos, U2 has always been more than a spy plane—and this group was too young to understand Judas Priest’s subliminal messages.
Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN, Fox has always been a major network, and Time has always worked with Warner. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee, and virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
You can find the full list—and lists from previous years—at http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset
Compliance August 22, 2007

Law Firms Want More Time to Comply With 409A

A group of 92 large law firms has asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for a one-year extension to comply with new §409A regulations, saying the current timeline is 'not sufficient' to ensure thorough compliance.
Reported by

The law firms, writing to the Acting IRS Commissioner Kevin Brown and to the Treasury Department, said the deadline did not give their clients enough time to adequately review their many deferred compensation agreements. The final regulations, issued in April, call for an effective date of January 1, 2008 (See Final Deferred Compensation Regulations Issued).

The letter stated that the deadline was imposing an “undue strain” on both companies and their advisers, including lawyers and accountants, and asked that the deadline be extended until January 1, 2009 and that the transition relief be extended until December 31, 2008.

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“If even we’re having problems with it, you can imagine how hard it is for everyone else,” said Regina Olshan, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, who signed the letter to the IRS on behalf of the 92 law firms. Olshan said the rules included almost 400 pages of new and “intricate” requirements. Having companies rush through the implementation of the regulations in such a tight time frame will lead to mistakes, oversights and errors, the letter said.

The regulations, part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, address tax treatment of compensation workers earn in one year that is not paid until a future year.

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