Delta computer outage costs $100m

Re: That's a nice round figure ...

That surprises you? That isn't being cynical, it is how the system is supposed to work. Businesses pay taxes on their profits: if they lose money as a result of incompetence the tax due goes down.

As for the actual amount claimed that won't directly affect the tax bill - it is not as if they claim any figure and the tax man takes it at face value without any evidence of expenses or lower sales.

Re: That's a nice round figure ...

" they will probably find a way to write off the incident against taxes"

People who don't run their own businesses, or indeed someone else's business always seem to think that there's some magic formula by which a business gets to "write off" losses. This doesn't happen and can't happen. All that happens is that there's less income for the business so they don't have to pay taxes on that lost income. Rather like if you were thrown out of work tomorrow and lost your income for the rest of the year, you won't have to pay income tax on the money you did not earn.

As to "nice round figure", it's an estimate or rather a ROM (Rough Order of Magnitude) back of a fag packet number. The real loss will have other digits than "1" and "0" but this finger in the air number lets the business know what sort of loss it is looking at and hence start to assess what provision it has to make to cover the loss.