This isn’t a old rule v’s new rule situation, its just that accounting standards evolved over time, mainly to stop corporations manipulating their financial results. Technically, appropriation is still the correct process, its just that accounting packages don’t make provision for them. If Manager did as @tony states “your profit & loss statement shows net profit before tax and net profit after tax” then the issue has clarity. If the P&L had this presentation then what “@lubos was talking about, allocating the amount and then paying the amount - two separate steps” would work perfectly (but requiring that dreaded journal entry). Until then, Retained Earning is preferable over Expense account.
I guess you could draft your Manager chart of accounts to represent that except you can’t manipulate the bottom “Net Profit” title. In fact I would prefer net profit before tax/dividends and net profit after tax/dividends so you can cater for dividends also. Noting that this process only applies to corporations so some sort of corporation preference setting would be required.
As for corporation tax, if you have straight forward business transactions your accounting profit may equal your tax return profit but quite often these two profits don’t match. Let say you had a 10,000 accounting profit and that included a provision for untaken annual leave of 1,000. This is a paper transaction which tax departments generally don’t accept as deductable so it gets added back, now your tax profit is 11,000. Governments may have a R&D incentive of 150% deduction, so if you expensed 12,000 this gives you a tax deduction of 18,000 so now your tax profit is 5,000.
These types of items, generally known as “Timing Differences”, are the reason that tax assessments are an off Balance Sheet activity, as they never get reflected in the accounting profit
PS: Because I drafted this over a period of time (interruptions) I hadn’t noted @lubos and @dalacor latest posts, sorry for any duplications