Indicate the effect on Working Capital Provided by Operations of the following independent transactions. Include the effects of income taxes assuming a rate of 40 percent of pretax income and that the same accounting methods used on the tax return are the same as on the financial statements.

a A firm using the lower-of-cost-or-market basis for inventories writes ending inventory down by \(\$ 50,000\).

b A firm has been using FIFO. It switches to LIFO during the current year and finds that the cost of goods sold is \(\$ 100,000\) larger than it would have been under FIFO.