[steve8918]

No.

Writing down a loss on a purchased company is not a taxable benefit at all. They are writing off goodwill and intangible assets which were acquired when they purchased a company, and this has no tax consequences. Maybe if they wrote off tangible assets, they could accelerate the depreciation, but it's most likely that all of the write down is in goodwill and maybe intangible assets.

[_delirium]

There are some cases in which you can write off intangible assets as "abandoned", but it's complex. A brief bit discussed in these two articles: http://www.cbiz.com/page.asp?pid=8872, http://www.cbiz.com/page.asp?pid=8984