Planned reductions in the U.S. defense budget over the next few years mean that the Department of Defense (DoD) has been challenged to spend less while rebuilding military readiness. To confront this challenge, various parts of the DoD are working on making weapons systems development more agile. The complete defense supplier ecosystem is now expected to deliver affordable, new technologies faster and maintain competitive advantage within the allocated budget, which may mean moving away from traditional cost-type contracts. The timeline for upcoming military programs...

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In response to a series of cyberattacks against the United States and its critical infrastructure, including the SolarWinds breach, President Biden recently issued an executive order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (Cyber EO). The Cyber EO creates several new cyber and data protection requirements that will impact organizations providing, directly or indirectly, cloud services, software solutions, and other information technology to the federal government. Compliance with the Cyber EO, and the resulting changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Defense Federal...

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A new retirement plan offering may help your business pool resources with other companies to provide retirement benefits for your employees — but are the trade-offs worth it for your organization? Key insights Smaller businesses may be able to use PEPs to provide more robust retirement plans than they could individually. Some businesses could greatly benefit from providers assuming oversight and some liability. These plans lack flexibility and have not undergone the test of time, but they may still be...

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Non-disclosure agreements, commonly known as NDAs, are a ubiquitous type of contract in many industries. NDAs can be useful in all sorts of situations, such as when companies look to work together on joint projects, when a party seeks investors, when an employee needs to use confidential information on the job, when a customer shares private data, or when parties agree to a legal settlement. It is important to craft these agreements carefully to protect your sensitive or confidential...

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On 18 May 2021, the European Commission issued a communication on “Business Taxation for the 21st Century”. The announcements made therein are expected to translate into actual legislative proposals in the next three years. If implemented, they would represent a systemic change to corporate taxation in the EU. Several short-term proposals would build upon the existing trends of increased transparency and substance requirements, and international negotiations on Pillar One and Pillar Two. The longer-term ambition is adopting a common set of rules to determine an EU consolidate corporate tax...

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The EACC, in partnership with the International Property Tax Institute (IPTI), wants to keep its members up to date with the latest developments in property taxes in the USA and Europe. IPTI has put together a selection of brief reports from articles contained in IPTI Xtracts which can be found on its website (www.ipti.org). UNITED STATES Pandemic-Driven Devalued Retail Real Estate Owners Should Seek Property Tax Reductions Retail real estate has been one of the hardest hit markets by the COVID-19 pandemic....

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This was previously posted in the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog | Though a bit provocative, this headline raises a liminal question on the various projects of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDBs): Which  governance will apply to them? Or as Juvenal, the poet in ancient Rome, famously asked, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” What Is a Central Bank Digital Currency? A CBDC is the digital form of a country’s fiat currency and, like traditional currency, represents a claim on that...

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On May 12, 2021, President Biden signed a landmark Executive Order to improve and modernize the federal government’s cybersecurity infrastructure. The Executive Order comes in the wake of numerous cyber incidents targeting the United States, including the so-called SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, and Colonial Pipeline incidents. The Executive Order will directly affect government contractors, including companies that sell software to the government or provide IT services. More broadly, but less directly, the Executive Order is likely to influence the informal, and eventually...

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Disruptionware is an emerging type of cyberattack calculated not only to disrupt the availability, integrity and confidentiality of victims’ data, systems and networks, but also to interrupt or shut down the essential business operations functions of its victims. More destructive than traditional malware and ransomware attacks which typically only target a victim’s systems and networks, disruptionware attacks target both the “information technology” (IT) and “operational technology” (OT) networks of its victims. In other words, disruptionware attacks target victims’ physical...

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