They may have a tax rebate which requires them to "invest" $x each year and failure to do so will result in penalties, perhaps nullifying the agreement and requirement to reimburse previous rebates.

So the company hires a few contractors to help get them as close to $x as possible, but they don't really have any work for them to do.

Simple example:

My FSA card is pre-tax money to be used for healthcare expenses. Towards the end of the year, I ended up still having a balance that would go away if not used, so I bought things that I would not have otherwise purchased.

That's a bit different. You're effectively getting "taxed" 100% on whatever is left over so you might as well spend the money on anything that has non-zero value to you.

But if you, say, only lost 30% or 50% of the balance, it's not immediately obvious if you should spend the balance or not.

OT but this is such a weird aspect of FSAs. I can carry some amount over with my plan which makes things a lot easier.

From my experience, FSA's doing go away at the end of the year.

You have to spend X anyway, because the money is pre-tax or non-taxable, you can spend 1.5X-2X, so the extra money is 'free'.

I'm with peteradio, I also never understand this line of reasoning.

Let's say the company has earned 1,000$ and the tax rate is 50%. Your expenses X are 100$.

So 1,000$ - 100$ = 900$. Of which 50% (450$) are tax and 50% (450$) are profit.

Now double X to 200$:

Then 1,000$ - 200$ = 800$. Of which 50% (400$) are tax and 50% (400$) are profit.

That means your profit is 50$ lower (400$ instead of 450$) then if you hadn't increased your spending?

Clearly my thinking is wrong somehow, but where?

If you can "invest" the 1K into something that you don't get taxed, and, can give you some return then it is a win.

I remember being mentioned that the whole reason General Electrics bought a division of Alstom was to not bring the money back to US and get taxed, let's say it was 1 billion dollars and 50% tax.

Instead of getting net 500 million back to US they can keep that money abroad and invest 1 billion in another company that can net more than 500 million in the long term.

Above is likely the way of thinking for those sort of occasions.

It should be a choice between spending pre tax dollars or spending post tax dollars. I doubt many would argue in favor of “burning” money just for the sake of not paying some fraction tax on it.

Imagine that you must access $100 of labour/whatever somehow.

  $20000 - sales
  ($10000) - cost of sales
  ——————
  $10000 - gross profit
  ($100) - extra labour paid for with pre tax money
  ——————
  $9900 net
  ($4950) tax
  ——————
  $4950 ending sum (pay dividends or do whatever you feel like with this)

vs

  $20000 - sales
  $10000 - cost of sales
  —————
  $10000 - gross profit
  ($5000) - tax
  —————
  $5000 - after tax profit
  ($100) - extra labour, post tax money
  ————
  $4900 - ending sum

It’s a bit unrealistic because (1) labour should always be pre tax (2) there are rules about what goes where in an income statement and you can’t just decide to put stuff where you want but there is some flexibility.

In particular, the one easily controllable lever is how much interest you pay on debt (pre tax spending)

Think of it this way: the “cost” to realize a net profit of $450 is a tax expense of $450. What if you could reinvest that full $900 so that next year your revenue and income are higher? High-growth businesses will optimize for reinvesting because they expect the Return on investment to be higher than the return on realized profit going forward.

This is what Amazon has done for years - it generates a monstrous amount of cash (free cash flow) from retail and funnels it back into expanding current businesses and creating new ones such as AWS. AWS now generates its own surplus, so the cycle continues.

Edit to clarify: Amazon in the past has shown a relatively small net income vs large top line revenue because most cash is reinvested. It’s been a few years since I paid attention to their financials so things may be different now.

It doesn't make sense in terms of raw profit, I agree. But many expenses are paid pre-tax effectively making them cheaper than if you had paid for them with post-tax dollars.

aren't all expenses pre (income)tax, by definition?

Not really. A good example is business meals. You can only deduct 50% of a meal with a substantial business purpose.

What matters in your example is where that extra money is spent, you might try to invest it in the company by purchasing new machinery rather than just wasting it on a new luxury company car (or an overseas 'business meeting'). That way if you are making a 10% return on your company/investment each year it continues to grow.

I guess in some situations you can either pay $1 in taxes or burn $1. it's probably better to burn $1.

You paid $50 (the decrease in profit) to get $100 of value.

Under what situations does this happen? We use marginal tax rates...

In limited cicrumstances it can make sense. If you're investing in a multi-year project you may as well maximize your investment in one year and take the loss against other taxable income that year. Then, when the project is finished, you pay taxes on the income that year. Only you can take those funds and invest them into a new multi-year project...

Some companies get tax breaks for hiring X number of workers in certain locations. Which is why sometimes you get companies hiring a bunch of people at a data center who don't do anything related to the data center, but mostly exist as a way to get a tax break and good press.

Sometimes to get yourself in a lower bracket.