A friend of mine on Facebook posted this today. She is a very wealthy, self-made woman who works in the financial industry:

Tomorrow will be a day in tax history – when Facebook goes public, it will get a $16 billion tax deduction, which is the largest tax deduction ever taken by any corporation exploiting the stock option tax loophole. Facebook’s recent filings in anticipation of its upcoming stock offering provide new facts about its plans to use stock option tax deductions, not only to help it avoid future taxes for years and years to come, but to get a refund of taxes it’s already paid. Facebook’s recent registration statement shows that, due to hundreds of millions of stock options handed out to its founders and top executives, it plans to claim stock option tax deductions worth a whopping $16 billion. That’s more than twice as much as estimates a few months ago, and many, many times larger than the stock option expenses shown on Facebook’s ledgers. Facebook is a booming, successful company. Its securities filing boasts of double-digit increases in Facebook’s average revenue per user, citing a 32 percent increase in 2010, and another 25 percent increase in 2011, with “growth across all regions.” Despite trumpeting those revenue increases to investors, Facebook is planning at the same time to tell Uncle Sam it has no taxable income, offsetting its revenues with stock option tax deductions. Facebook’s $16 billion stock option tax deduction is so huge, it will enable Facebook to claim a $500 million refund of taxes paid over the prior two years and wipe out this year’s tax bill. The company says it will also use its deduction to create a “net operating loss” that can be used to eliminate its profits and its taxes for up to 20 years into the future.