Abstract This article examines the problems associated with the current accounting for deferred taxes in the United States, and the extent to which the Financial Accounting Standards Board Statement (FASB) No. 96 addresses these problems. The new FASB statement on deferred taxes may represent a certain improvement over its predecessor, but unfortunately it is still lacking a solid foundation on either theoretical or practical grounds. FASB Statement No. 96 continues to require comprehensive tax allocation, but it abandons the deferred method in favor of the liability method and prohibit the discounting of deferred tax amount to the present value. Accounting for deferred taxes has been criticized for being complex, costly, irrelevant and inconsistent with the conceptual framework.
Chaney et al. (Thu,) studied this question.