Gary Ellis
Analyst · Kristen Stewart of Deutsche Bank
Yeah. Okay. With respect to, first of all, the Kyphon aspect and the charge we took in the quarter related to Kyphon. This relates to an issue we’ve had that was raised by the IRS related to our acquisition of Kyphon several years ago and which we used a combination of basically OUS cash and U.S. cash, the comparison there. There was a dispute on how much of that was taxable, et cetera. So as you recall, we used about $3.3 billion of OUS cash to do that transaction. What we’ve ended up agreeing with preliminary decision, the Board still has to approve this, but we agreed basically the settlement with the IRS where we ended up paying about $275 million to settle that and then interest on top of that gets you to the charge we took for the quarter overall. This is not the transfer pricing, put it for transfer pricing issue that we’ve talked about in some of the other previous meetings where which we’ll have a significant impact on the cash flow going forward, this is kind of more of a one-off item related to the acquisition. But it was a major outstanding issue we had with the IRS and we’re happy to get this when settled and move beyond it. As far as the tax rate going forward, 16% to 18%, that is basically in-line with what we’ve expected. If you went back and looked at Medtronic previously and remember this is all now on cash earning and so it’s actually a lower rate that you put in the amortization impact. So it -- you got to make sure you're looking at apples-to-apples when you look at this, Kristen. But, overall, I mean, Medtronic previously was kind of in -- we’ve been in that kind of 18% to 20% range, Covidien had been kind of in that 16% to 17% range. And then as we basically pull this all together, you leverage those and as we indicated is we’re going to get about 200 basis point drop as we come forward related to that. So as a result, we end up on that 16% to 18% range, I mean, is it 15.5% to 17.5%, I mean, that’s kind of how we get to the overall number. So it’s in line with what we've expected and been guiding towards overall. Obviously, there is still lot of moving parts with respect to the tax planning and strategies as we go forward, but we think that range is right in line with kind of what we saw here in Q4 as we went forward. It’s all depends on R&D tax credit, getting renewed, all those types of things. So as we go forward, we feel confident that that’s we are kind of in that range than we’ll have to see where that ultimately ends up, but that’s kind of our current expectation. It is in line with what we’ve been saying previously.