The majority of the Top Companies issue is just about done, dear readers! Still need to finish up some layouts and write the short intros to the two major sections (Top 20 Pharma & Top 10 Biopharma), but the finish line is actually within sight!

So I thought I’d take a break from my biopharma layouts and share with you a couple of odd laughs:

Inadvertent Pharma Phunnies

Boehringer Ingelheim sponsors a website on transient ischemic attack. It’s www.stroke-forum.com, and I bet it receives a lot of disappointed visitors.

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Astellas, a Japanese company, has a press release section with a link to archives titled “What’s New in the past”. Not quite Engrish, but close!

Advertent Pharma Phunnies

I needed a subhed for a section on how Enbrel has a strict warning about the possibility of TB and other infections among patients. Since Amgen has been hit with a lot of labeling and safety issues this past year, I went with “Phthisis Ridiculous!”

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Huge restructuring plans with portentous names were the norm this year, leading to this paragraph from my Wyeth profile:

In 2008, Wyeth transitioned from its open-ended and somewhat ambiguous Project Springboard productivity plan into Project Impact. While the notions of “springboard” and “impact” may evoke images of Wile E. Coyote smashed flat against a cliff face, this new initiative is intended to “adjust down our infrastructure and reduce our operating costs in response to loss of Protonix sales in 2008 [and] to facilitate long-term growth, as well as to address short-term fiscal challenges,” according to the company’s 10-K statements.

Okay, maybe I’m just punchy.

No posts today, dear readers. I still have to research and write 1000-word profiles for Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, Amgen and Genentech, and 350-word profiles for Merck Serono and Schering Plough. Then I get to lay out the issue over the holiday weekend so we can get it out to the printer by Monday. Joy!

But that’s the tradeoff for the money and travel opportunities. I’m not complaining so much as letting you know that you’ll be lucky to get some Unrequired Reading tomorrow.

Don’t blow (your own) fingers off this weekend!

A few years ago, I wrote about the American Jobs Creation Act (here and here), a bill passed in 2004 that permitted U.S. companies to repatriate overseas funds at a reduced tax rate (essentially 5.25%). It was a one-time act, and made some sense, given that the U.S. has one of the largest corporate tax rates in the world (essentially 35%). The joke I discovered about “jobs creation” was that, in the pharma business, this act overlapped with the onset of massive layoffs in this industry.

Today, the NYTimes writes about the bill, how the amount of money that came back to the U.S. was 50% higher than government estimates ($312 billion to $200 billion), and how the tax revenues generated were six times higher than a congressional committee anticipated ($18 billion to $2.6 billion). It’s great that tax revenues got a big boost, but the it looks like the biggest “creation” was in the creative accounting department.

Companies were told by the government that the repatriated funds had to be dedicated to R&D, employment, and other “jobs creation”-y domestic investments. Of course, there was no provision stating that funds previously allocated to those needs couldn’t be shifted away to other activities.

“It basically worked out to be one big giveaway,” said Robert Willens, a tax and accounting authority in New York. “The law never took into account the fact that money is fungible.”

Mr. Willens said while companies did make investments in their domestic operations, the repatriated money also freed up a corresponding amount of cash to pay out to shareholders or buy back stock — moves that do not generate job growth or investments. “We know that a lot of stock was retired during this time,” he said.

While you read all about it, I’ll get back to last year’s financials and letcha know what neat accounting tricks I come across.