Understanding Tax Provisions in M&A Agreements
In Private Benefits in Public Offerings, Prof. Shobe describes the emergence and evolution of a fascinating term in initial public offerings: tax receivable agreements (TRAs). These agreements reserve for the pre-IPO owners of the business the economic value of certain tax attributes that are either created in the course of the IPO or which were created over a course of years before the IPO. TRAs are contracts between the post-IPO corporation and the pre-IPO owners, pursuant to which the corporation makes distributions to those pre-IPO owners as tax assets are used. In one variation, pre-IPO owners receive the economic benefit of basis step ups that arise in certain “turbocharged” IPOs, and in other variations the pre-IPO owners receive the economic benefit of net operating losses and historical basis in the corporation’s assets.