A third-party audit of the oil spill settlement program finds the program has correctly processed 99.5 percent of claims. The audit, conducted by Chicago-based McGladrey LLP, concluded the program is "well-designed and appropriate" and made no major recommendations for improvement.The audit has become a focal point for BP in its fight to remove claims administrator Patrick Juneau and challenge the settlement program, which it claims is riddled with fraud and errors.
The state of Alabama wants you to think small when you’re shopping this Saturday. Governor Robert Bentley is declaring November twenty ninth to be Small Business Saturday in Alabama. This will be the fifth year in a row that the state has put small business owners in the limelight on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Julie Magee is the state’s revenue commissioner. She says there’s also a new website called AtlasAlabama to help people starting small businesses to get information tailored to meet their needs…
“And it will say, here is the website you need to go to get a state of Alabama sales tax application, because if you’re going to sell products in our state you need a sales tax application. If you’re going to operate in the City of Tuscaloosa, then you’ll need a city of Tuscaloosa business license.”
Businesses in Alabama with fifty or fewer workers are considered small. There are almost four hundred thousand small businesses in our state, which accounted for five thousand new jobs in 2011 alone.
The season finale of “Alabama, Inc.” airs tonight on your local Alabama Public Television station. For the second straight year, the APR news team has collaborated on this television show about business. Tonight, news director Pat Duggins will introduce us to Caroline Myers of Huntsville. She’s president and co-founder of Foreign Language Services. She and her team translate documents from English into eighty other languages for their clients. The business started in 1979. Myers says back then, she did a lot of translating work for the military…
“There was a lot of work with the D-O-D, with the government, with the Air Force, with the Army. And it was basically was because we were kind of still in that cold war…the iron curtain hadn’t come down, the Berlin wall hadn’t come down.”
The arrival of Mercedes Benz twenty years later expanded Myer’s client base into German, French, Japanese and other languages. Find out how Caroline Myers got from here to there tonight on Alabama, Inc. at 10 p.m. on your local Alabama Public Television station.
