832
Opinion of the Court
is simply not so. We have seen already that the calculation of a group member's STI by definition excludes several items that an individual taxpayer would normally account for in computing income or loss, but which an affiliated group may tally only at the consolidated level, such as capital gains and losses, charitable-contribution deductions, and dividends-received deductions. Treas. Regs. §§ 1.1502-12( j) to (n). Owing to these exclusions, an affiliate's STI will tend to be inflated by eliminating deductions it would have taken if it had filed separately, or deflated by eliminating an income item like capital gain.
When pushed, the Government concedes that STI is "not necessarily equivalent to the income or [NOL] figure that the corporation would have computed if it had filed a separate return." Brief for United States 21, n. 14. But, the Government claims, "[t]here has never been a taxpayer with [PLEs] who had a positive [STI] but a negative separate [NOL]." Tr. of Oral Arg. 27. In other words, the Government says that the deductions excluded from STI have never once made a difference and, therefore, that STI is, in fact, a decent enough proxy for a group member's "separate" NOL. But whether or not the excluded items have made a difference in the past, or make a difference here, they certainly could make a difference and, given the potential importance of some of the deductions involved (a large charitable contribution, for example), it is not hard to see how the difference could favor the Government.
The Court of Appeals was therefore right to reject the Government's reliance on STI as a functional surrogate for an affiliate's "separate" NOL. 208 F. 3d, at 459-460. But what the Court of Appeals used in place of STI fares no better. The court relied on Treas. Reg. § 1.1502-79, which contains a definition of "separate net operating loss" that the court believed to be "analogous to an individual's 'net operating loss' on a separate return." 208 F. 3d, at 460. Section 1.1502-79(a)(3) provides that, "[f]or purposes of this
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