Per Investopedia: “A write-down becomes a write-off if the entire balance of the asset is eliminated and removed from the books altogether.” Is that 400 million that is tax deductible as capital loss or is that just the term being used here. I know little if anything about tax law, and nothing about corporate taxes, but i wouldn't put it past the American government to reimburse a large company for wasting money.Disney declined to comment. But one bit of language in Disney’s quarterly filing Wednesday is telling: Disney describes the $353 million “impairment charge” it took on Vice as a “write-off” — which in accounting-speak means there’s nothing left to get rid of after this. It’s all gone..
It's a financial disclosure under GAAP rules - this isn't for the tax man, it's for Wall Street. GAAP requires Disney to say "we've previously reported that we had these assets worth this much but we now estimate that they will be worth this much less." If they were reporting it to the IRS as a loss, yeah they get to count that against earnings (and rightly so). But this is Disney officially reporting to their investors that Vice is worth $353m less than it was the last time they chatted.The Company also has assets that are required to be recorded at fair value on a non-recurring basis. These assets are evaluated when certain triggering events occur (including a decrease in estimated future cash flows) that indicate the asset should be evaluated for impairment. For the quarter and six-month period ending March 30, 2019, the Company recorded an impairment charge of $353 million for the write-off of an equity method investment as a result of a level 3 fair value measurement. The impairment was recorded in “Equity in the income / (loss) of investees, net” in the Condensed Consolidated Statements of Income.