Income Taxes

On December 22, 2017, the 2017 Tax Act was enacted. The 2017 Tax Act is comprehensive tax reform legislation that contains significant changes to corporate taxation, including a permanent reduction of the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%, a mandatory one-time tax on un-repatriated accumulated earnings of foreign subsidiaries, a partial limitation on the deductibility of business interest expense, and a shift from U.S. taxation on worldwide income of multinational corporations to a partial territorial system (along with rules that create a new U.S. minimum tax on earnings of foreign subsidiaries).

We recognized the income tax effects of the 2017 Tax Act in accordance with Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 118 (“SAB 118”), which provides SEC staff guidance for the application of ASC Topic 740, Income Taxes, to the 2017 Tax Act. SAB 118 allows for a measurement period of up to one year after the enactment date to finalize the recording of the related tax impacts. We believe the provisional amounts recorded during the fourth quarter of 2017 continue to represent a reasonable estimate of the accounting implications of the 2017 Tax Act. We did not identify any items for which the income tax effects of the 2017 Tax Act could not be reasonably estimated through September 30, 2018.

We believe that our recorded deferred tax assets and liabilities are reasonable. However, tax laws and regulations are subject to interpretation, and the outcomes of tax disputes are inherently uncertain; therefore, our assessments can involve a series of complex judgments about future events and rely heavily on estimates and assumptions.

Our estimated annual effective tax rate, adjusted for discrete tax items, is applied to our pretax loss for the current interim period in 2018 as we previously made the determination that a return to the annualized effective tax rate method is appropriate for 2018. A year-to-date effective tax rate method was used for recording income taxes for the comparative interim period in 2017 based on expectations that a small change in our estimated ordinary income could result in a large change in the estimated annual effective tax rate.

The effective tax rates for the three- and nine-month periods ended September 30, 2018 were 3.0% and 2.8%, respectively. The effective tax rates for the three- and nine-month periods ended September 30, 2017 were (204.9)% and 5.2%, respectively. The variance was primarily attributable to the earnings mix between our higher and lower tax rate jurisdictions, the reduction of the U.S. corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21% as a result of the 2017 Tax Act, and a tax charge in 2017 attributable to a change in tax position related to our foreign taxes.

Income taxes are provided based on the U.S. statutory rate and at the local statutory rate for each foreign jurisdiction adjusted for items that are allowed as deductions for federal and foreign income tax reporting purposes, but not for book purposes. The primary differences between the U.S. statutory rate and our effective rate are as follows:



	Three Months Ended September 30,				Nine Months Ended September 30,
	2018		2017		2018		2017

U.S. statutory rate	21.0	%	35.0	%	21.0	%	35.0	%
Foreign provision	(18.5	)	(241.5	)	(19.1	)	2.8
Change in tax position ⁽¹⁾	—		—		—		(29.3	)
Other	0.5		1.6		0.9		(3.3	)
Effective rate	3.0	%	(204.9	)%	2.8	%	5.2	%


(1)	As a result of a change in tax position related to our foreign taxes, we recorded a tax charge of $6.3 million in June 2017.