As the NFL, and now apparently the NBA, take to locking out players, Tommy Craggs takes a look at some of the accounting trickery owners use to pad their books. There are some surprisingly generous tax benefits for owners of professional sports teams. Ever heard of a Roster Depreciation Allowance? It seems the RDA has been around since 1959, and it allows owners to deduct roster expenses not once, but twice; once for "player salaries", and second time under "loss on players' contracts".
"Every year, taxpayers hand the plutocrats who own sports franchises a fat pile of money for no other reason than that one of those plutocrats, many years ago, convinced the IRS that his franchise is basically a herd of cattle. Fort calls it "special-interest legislation." "It's not illegal," he says. "It's just weird."
ESPN took a closer look at the numbers as well. The reality is that a team's paper losses are sometimes just an accounting fiction courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.