Loss Utilization - Carry Back
- 02:26
Understand the mechanics of tax loss carry backs
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With loss utilization carry back, we can offset current losses against historical profits. Here we have an example. We can see in year minus two, the profit before tax was 100. Fantastic, this company had a profit, it had 30 of tax expense, and meaning they paid 30 cash taxes. In year minus one, exactly the same figures happened. Fantastic, the company's still making profits. But it's now year zero. The profit before tax has unfortunately now changed to a loss, it's 150. So how can we use those losses? If we look at years minus one and minus two, we can see that there were profits there, profits before tax of 200. We could use the 150 of losses in year zero against that 200 of profits in the previous two years. So of the 150 of losses, let's take 100 of it and use it against year minus one, fantastic. Imagine there's no profits in year minus one anymore, and that tax expense of 30 we'll get a refund off that. Brilliant. We've still got another 50 of losses so we can take that back to year minus two. That's about half the profits in year minus two so we'll be able to get half of the tax expense or cash taxes back. So we'll get a refund of 15 from there. So in total I'll get 15 refunded for minus two, 30 from year minus one, give me 45 refunded in year zero. So instead of having a tax expense in year zero we now have a tax credit and a cash tax refund. The accounting for this in year zero will be the retained earnings goes up. Normally, you'd think a tax expense would make your retained earnings go down and your cash would go down as you pay it. Instead in this case, we're doing the opposite. Retained earnings will go up due to the tax credit and the cash will go up due to that refund from the tax authorities. Importantly, there's no deferred tax asset created here because we completely utilize those losses in carrying back to the previous years. If we hadn't been able to use all those losses, and we had carried forward, we would then create a deferred tax asset. The big benefit here is that you can take that tax credit in the year of loss, in this case, in year zero. We get cash immediately and this can be fantastic news for a company that in a year of losses, that they get a cash injection. That's really good news.