What's behind the hoopla when major award shows bring out the accountants? Quite a bit, if you're Ernst & Young, who has kept the tally for Golden Globe Award winners for more than 30 years.Already, the firm is at work for this year's broadcast on Sunday, Jan. 23, and "3" seems to be a magic number. For three days prior to the broadcast, only three people - two EY CPAs and one assistant, know who the winners will be.Remember the 5:30 a.m. press conference in December to announce the nominees?

Many CPAs and accounting professionals rely on the Internet to transfer client files and sensitive information, but sometimes high security just doesn't work.Such was the case as MSNBC was able to hack through files, using a common database tool, to view the records of seven e-commerce Web sites, including personal information about cardholders.

Testing for skills and aptitude before hiring is nothing new, but doing it over the Internet has become one of the new trends because of the immense savings in time.Ernst & Young has contracted with Virginia-based Brainbench to use the company's skills assessment tests to screen applicants for 500 IT professionals who will work on EY's Sprint contract.According to EY, using online testing sources like Brainbench reduces the hiring time from weeks to a matter of hours.

Deloitte Consulting announced today that it has formed an alliance with CFOWeb.com, the financial services industry's first full-service Internet portal site for CFOs, fund managers, and corporate treasury operations. The strategic alliance is aimed at providing financial institutions with seamless integration to CFOWeb.com.Deloitte Consulting will work with investment banks and financial services providers to develop comprehensive e-commerce strategies to integrate with CFOWeb.com.

The Sage Group, owners of Sage and its popular line of accounting software like Acuity, Peachtree and BusinessWorks, has announced it will buy Best Software. The transaction is expected to be final in February in this cash deal worth $35 per share or $445 million.Best is known throughout accounting circles for its line of human resources, fixed asset and payroll software.

If you use the Web, chances are you're accumulating many user Ids and passwords that are getting increasingly more difficult to manage. For obvious security reasons, you DON'T want to use the same login information for each site. So what to do? PassKeeper is a free Windows utility that allows you to keep a list of accounts with usernames, passwords, and even notes on the sites you visit -- a handy feature if you frequent multiple locations.

Options in continuing professional education abound, and certainly the Internet has become a prime source of educational opportunities through various providers.One of the largest efforts to date is the one produced by Arthur Andersen with its Virtual Learning Network.

Data is all around us. That’s not the problem. The problem is organizing and making sense of that data. When it comes to determining the frequency of specific data, manually grouping and counting data can be a chore. Excel can do the work for you.Between the histogram analysis tool and the array function, you will be sure to get the data you need – in a way you can use it. A histogram, also known as a frequency distribution, is a table or chart that counts the number of times a range of values occurs in a set of data. Histograms work well when you want to measure performance.

Thanks to Steve Sanchez for a record-breaking workshop session on Making Database Integration Work For You! As a partner with InfoSolve, Inc., Steve understands the challenge of converting data into useful information.