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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

I think it's from this: https://itep.org/meta-tax-breaks-trump-mark-zuckerberg/

The post seems to be comparing quarterly figures for tax with annual profit. The doc they cite clearly $25B as provision for income tax.

I am not an accountant or finance professional but the table they refer to has the 2.8B under "current" and the 25B figure under "total". Is it just that of their 2025 taxes, they paid 2.8B during that calendar year and it's only Feb and the remaining was not yet actually paid out at the time that filing was prepared?

While they provisioned $25B, the 10-K Meta filed states they paid $2.8B in Federal income taxes for the full year 2025. The amount they provisioned is not limited to Federal income taxes, it also includes state and foreign income taxes.

Interesting. Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable. Statisticians and accountants are both professional liars (speaking as a statistician married to an accountant).

> Wouldn’t surprise me if there are different ways to report the same numbers to make the situation seem more or less favorable.

Yeah -- accurately, and inaccurately.

Can the post be community noted?

Are you implying that there are four quadrants:

  - Accurate / favorable
  - Inaccurate / favorable
  - Accurate / unfavorable
  - Inaccurate / unfavorable

Or are you implying that Meta spoke the God’s honest truth out of a sense of societal duty and honor.

In this instance, only two combinations -- accurate and favorable vs inaccurate and unfavorable.

Meta and Meta's accountants spoke the truth in their audited financial statements. I cannot speak to the motivation in their hearts, but I am aware that there are significant financial and criminal consequences to publishing incorrect financial statements.

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