Cite as: 532 U. S. 822 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
come and (if they exceed income and produce a CNOL) are carried back against prior income. STI is merely an accounting construct devised as an interim step in computing a group's CTI or CNOL; it "has no other purpose." Inter-met, 209 F. 3d, at 906 ("A member's STI is simply a step along the way to calculating the group's taxable income or CNOL"). The fact that a group member's PLEs reduce its STI, which in turn either reduces the group's CTI or contributes to its CNOL "dollar for dollar," ibid., is of no other moment.8 If there were anything wrong in what United Dominion proposes to do, it would be wrong in relation to CNOL and its use for any carryback. Yet, as noted above, no one here disputes that the group members had PLEs in the total amount claimed or that the AMCA group is entitled to carry back the full amount of its CNOL to offset income in prior years. The only question is what portion, if any, of AMCA's CNOL is PLL and, as such, eligible for 10-year, as opposed to 3-year, carryback treatment. There is no more of a double deduction with a 10-year carryback than one for three years.
A second objection was the reason that the Court of Appeals rejected the single-entity approach. That court attached dispositive significance to the fact that, while the Treasury Regulation we have discussed, § 1.1502-12, specifically provides that several items (capital gains and losses, charitable-contribution deductions, etc.) shall be accounted for on a consolidated basis, it does not similarly provide for accounting for PLEs on a consolidated basis: "The regulations provide for blending the group members' [NOLs],
8 It makes no difference whatsoever whether the affiliate's PLEs are (1) first netted against each member's income and then aggregated or (2) first aggregated and then netted against the group's combined income: under either method, AMCA's CNOL is the same. See Axelrod & Blank 1394 (noting that this conclusion follows from "the associative principle of arithmetic (which holds that the groupings of items in the case of addition and subtraction have no effect on the result)").
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