On the heels of billionaire Mark Cuban's recent comments regarding his multimillion-dollar tax bill, Withers Private Client and Tax partner, Ryan LoRusso spoke to Forbes for their article "Why Billionaire Mark Cuban Just Wired $280 Million To The IRS" to discuss likely deductions and adjustments the billionaire took advantage of.
Major assets, investments and other sources of income can cause tax bills to vary each year. Mark Cuban, who is worth an estimated $5.4 billion, likely saw a high tax bill this year because he sold a majority of his key asset, the Dallas Mavericks. Ryan LoRusso explains that sport teams can involve complicated calculations and that Cuban likely took advantage of some deductions and adjustments, "For example, even though Forbes' valuation of the team [Dallas Mavericks] has increased 20-fold in the past 22 years, Cuban could have been depreciating his assets or carrying forward previous losses". Ryan also added, "It's kind of like what you might see with a venture capital portfolio company where the company hasn't turned a profit, but it's generating significant value. That could happen here. The team could potentially have an operating loss that wasn't fully able to be used by some of the owners but because of expected future revenues and profits being so high, in the year of the sale [the owners] can free that up." Ryan added another potential explanation, "Cuban's tax bill might not include all the proceeds from the sale. Like with some other corporate deals, the Mavericks sale may have been done in installments".
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