Tax provision is the accounting metric for amount of taxes a company owes to all taxing entities, domestic and foreign.

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Under current accounting rules most companies do not report the full costs of pension provision in their profit and loss account.

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Yet another Sarbox provision, absent vigorous SEC enforcement, may even be leading, perversely, to less disclosure of accounting problems.

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For instance, the recent guideline on fair-value accounting, which decrees that companies must show equity holdings at their market value, also contains a provision that allows them to avoid writing down shares if they think that they will soon recover in value.

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