Why Tesla ZEV Credits Don't Appear on the Balance Sheet
I asked this question to an accountant friend you runs a web site on accounting technical issues:
Tesla gets Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credits from about 10 states for selling EV's. These have a LOT of value and can be sold to other car makers who need them to compete in these states. In the past Tesla has sold batches of them for upwards of a billion dollars, so they are material. Tesla tends to horde them for several quarters and then sell them in a big batch to juice a particular quarter. However, they do not appear on the balance sheet. Anywhere. It is a public company but no one in the outside world knows how many of the ZEV credits Tesla has until they show up on the income statement as having been sold and having generated a huge profit.
How is it possible that Tesla is gaining these valuable assets with each sale of a car in certain states but they are not getting put on the balance sheet in any way?
I learned of this a few weeks ago, and was actually thinking about writing a blog post on it because it is so ridiculous. I’ll try to explain quickly.
One’s first reaction could be that this is a “tax asset,” like tax loss carryforwards. BUT, GAAP only addresses tax assets that arise from determination of income taxes; hence, the literature on “deferred tax assets” is not directly in the scope of this issue.
The second thought is that this is a contribution from a government that has value. BUT, GAAP is silent on how to account for donations to a company from the government (ironically, this is addressed by International Financial Reporting Standards, but not GAAP).
In a nutshell, that leaves Tesla with a lot of wiggle room on accounting for this. The FASB’s definition of an asset in its conceptual framework would pretty clearly include this, but not perfectly. So, with the permission of its auditors, Tesla gets to treat this as sort of a rainy-day reserve. It’s utterly ridiculous – classic definition of a loophole.
It's probably a marker of our expanding corporate state that GAAP needs to address more carefully "donations to a company from the government."
