Valuing Deferred Tax and Losses
- 01:38
Review issues in tax loss valuation - which discount rate
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Glossary
DTAs NOLs Tax Losses WACCTranscript
Losses can be used to offset against future profits, and the benefit of this is that we can reduce our tax expense. That gives us a future benefit, and we want to value that. We want to quantify the value of that to us today. The method we'll use to do that is to use the present value of future cash flows to value those losses. The big problem we have though is what discount rate do we use in that present value calculation? There are a couple of options available to us, but there's no one right answer. Firstly, we could use the cost of equity. The reason for this is that taxes or the tax cash flows, if you imagine, are not paying taxes to the tax authorities that get to keep them. Those taxes are post-interest. The cost of debt that might go into a WACC only comes about because of interest and debt. If we've already got rid of the interest, then maybe cost of equity is the best discount rate to use. However, in terms if we could use the cost of debt, and the reason for this is that your tax cash flows are actually more certain than cash flows to equity holders. Cash flows to equity holders have a lot of risk. They might not happen, whereas these cash flows that are not getting paid to the tax authorities or rebate from the tax governments behind it. The third and final option is to use the WACC, and this is what's used by many practitioners. A final option used by some practitioners is to use the unlevered cost of equity, and similar to the WACC, an unlevered cost of equity is going to be a lower cost of capital than the cost of equity but probably a little bit higher than the cost of debt. So again, WACC is sometimes used as a proxy for your unlevered cost of equity.