Well, this is galling.

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday issued an exception to long-standing tax rules for the benefit of Citigroup and a few other companies partially owned by the government. As a result, Citigroup will be allowed to retain billions of dollars worth of tax breaks that otherwise would decline in value when the government sells its stake to private investors.

This comes via CalculatedRisk, who comments:

Who benefits? The value of the shares the U.S. owns should increase, but only 34% of the share price increase accrues to U.S. taxpayers The other current shareholders receive the rest. So this doesn't seem to make sense ...

Image by Flickr user extratony used under a Creative Commons license.