LIFO: Tax Treatment of Inventory

LIFO helps firms avoid the penalty on inventory investment created by FIFO and is neither a targeted tax break nor a subsidy (as some opponents suggest). Another type of contra account is known as “contra revenue,” which is used to adjust gross revenue to calculate net revenue, i.e. the “final” revenue figure listed on the income statement. A contra account enables a company to report the original amount while also reporting the oil and gas accounting appropriate downward adjustment. A contra account is an entry on the general ledger with a balance contrary to the normal balance for that categorization (i.e. asset, liability, or equity). If the current credit-adjusted risk-free rate is 5.5% in 2021 (still assuming a 2% inflation rate), the new ARO is measured at $2,722. For Foreign Affairs, Peking University’s Michael Pettis looks at the high price of dollar dominance.

While repealing LIFO might seem like an inconsequential way to raise revenue, it would penalize investment in inventory and move the tax system away from neutrality towards investment. Until recently, most of the CO2 used for EOR has come from naturally-occurring reservoirs. But new technologies are being developed to produce CO2 from industrial applications such as natural gas processing, fertilizer, ethanol, and hydrogen plants in locations where naturally occurring reservoirs are not available. One demonstration at the Dakota Gasification Company’s plant in https://www.bookstime.com/ Beulah, North Dakota is producing CO2 and delivering it by a 204-mile pipeline to the Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan, Canada. Encana, the field’s operator, is injecting the CO2 to extend the field’s productive life, hoping to add another 25 years and as much as 130 million barrels of oil that might otherwise have been abandoned. Thus, the present crisis can be seen as a “stress test” of the accounting framework that reveals that book valuation need not always reflect the best estimate of asset value, especially at a time of sharp declines in market values.

The Dollar: The World’s Reserve Currency

Part of the debate on financial reform centres around the information required from banks for effective market discipline and supervisory action. This includes not only thinking on the required level of detail on disclosure of bank assets and liabilities but also on their valuation techniques and the appropriateness of current accounting rules more generally (for a survey, see Laux and Leuz, 2009). The financial crisis has reinvigorated a debate on the effectiveness of our accounting and regulatory frameworks. This column shows that banks, hoping to preserve their book capital, use accounting discretion to systematically understate the impairment of their real-estate-related assets. But the accounting reforms announced thus far are exacerbating the gap between book and market values. The euro is the second most used reserve currency, accounting for roughly 20 percent of global foreign exchange reserves.

Figure 3 presents the variations in EBITDA valuation multiples for the different types of oilfield services companies. Many in the industry believe that impairments will continue to be an important topic of conversation over the next few years. Ensuring that your firm – no matter what size – understands impairments and what affects them will affect the financial health of your company.

Oil and gas reserves and resource quantification

TSR is a critical measure for investors and analysts to evaluate a company’s performance from a shareholder’s perspective. A higher TSR indicates better performance and greater value creation for shareholders, while a lower TSR may suggest underperformance. Net Profit Margin is a profitability ratio calculated as net income divided by revenue or net profits divided by sales. You could also base a contribution analysis or accretion / dilution calculation on non-financial metrics, such as Production Per Share or Proved Reserves Per Share. I hinted at this in the last part of the NAV explanation above, but sum of the parts is a very common valuation methodology in the energy industry. Then, you add up and discount everything based on the standard 10% discount rate used in the Oil & Gas industry (no WACC or Cost of Equity here).

If 500,000 barrels are produced, reserves are decreased to 1.5 million, and the FCP decreases to $37.5 million. Repealing LIFO treatment of inventory would generate relatively little revenue for its economic costs. And LIFO repeal would disproportionately burden companies within industries that maintain more inventories and further disincentivize investment that could prevent supply chain breakdowns.

Proved reserves of natural gas

Instead, the costs are spread out over time, allowing the company to earn revenue from the asset. Capitalizing costs helps companies since they don’t have to realize the full expense in year one. Proponents of taxing LIFO reserves argue it is efficient because it is retroactive and ergo does not change future incentives to work or invest. But repealing LIFO does not just tax accumulated LIFO reserves—it will change incentives for future inventory investments. The oil market is cyclical by nature — if crude prices fall, so does investment and then output, which in turn drives up prices — and oil services companies ride the rollercoaster by using the upturns to raise their prices to offset the downturns.