There’s a good chance your organization’s tech budget is bloating, thanks to spending priorities like cybersecurity and AI making it hard to close the pocketbook. This brings up a dilemma for CFOs: How can companies practice cost discipline without stifling innovation?

Experts we spoke with offered a very human solution to the tech-spending dilemma: teamwork and communication. But that’s easier said than done, they added, because there tend to be walls between the key functions of finance and IT.

“CFOs and CIOs…use a lot of the same terms, and oftentimes mean fundamentally different things,” according to Powell Latimer, market research and analytics manager at the Technology Business Management (TBM) Council. This de facto language barrier can create “two separate spreadsheets that each different side is using for truth,” which is a great way to create perpetual headaches at quarterly business reviews, he told CFO Brew.

Organizations can overcome these barriers by establishing a common language between departments, and getting granular on all the inputs of IT spend—breaking it out, for example, into tech, labor, and cloud costs.

Keep reading.—AZ

IRS auditors may, once again, be asked to do more with less.

The House Appropriations Committee has advanced a funding bill for fiscal year 2027 that would slash nearly $1.4 billion from the IRS’s enforcement budget, Reuters reported. The proposed cuts match the amount the Treasury Department requested in its 2027 budget proposal earlier this month. Treasury also recommended the IRS shed 2,000 jobs, the bulk of them in enforcement, per the Federal News Network.

The cuts would further shrink a function that was already diminished by 2025’s reduction in force. A May 2025 TIGTA report found that the IRS lost 31% of its revenue agents, who perform audits, and at least 18% of its revenue agents, who collect delinquent taxes, through March 2025.

House Democrats opposed the budget bill, with Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer, ranking member of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Subcommittee, likening an IRS with reduced collections capabilities to a business that fails to collect its accounts receivable.

Keep reading.—CV

One country has slowly been moving toward a four-day workweek, and according to reports, it’s thanks to women.

Where in the world? Workers in the Netherlands averaged 32 hours of work per week in 2024, Fortune reported. And while the country doesn’t officially have a four-day workweek, it’s largely the norm for working mothers, who are reportedly the main drivers of the shift, according to Four Day Week.

As more women began entering the workforce in the 1980s, the Netherlands switched to a work model that allowed one parent to work full-time while the other worked part-time, aided by tax breaks. The model allowed all workers in the country more flexibility, and helped more women, who had traditionally been at home, enter the workplace for the first time.

Since then, unemployment shrank from 7.3% in 1991 to 3.7% in 2026. The country’s largest labor union, FNV, is also lobbying the Dutch government to officially switch to a 32-hour workweek.

Keep reading on HR Brew.—KP