Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you. Today's question-and-answer session will be conducted electronically. (Operator Instructions). We'll take our first question from Jason Bazinet at Citi.
Jason Bazinet - CitiGroup Smith Barney
Hey just had a question on the IRS ruling. Given that 8-K that came up that sort of pushed the deadline after that July 31. Is it fair to assume that you expect it to get a favorable IRS ruling already? And if you don't get favorable ruling, can just you help us think to what the potential scenarios are from there, even if it's a low profitability? Thanks.
Larry Hunter
Yeah originally we did expect that given that this was an amendment to an existing filing that the IRS would have ruled within roughly 10 weeks that we had. And it turned out that summer vacations got delayed, not summer vacations of DIRECTV or Liberty Media.
So we're... in terms of the assessment of the likely ruling, like I said we're still very optimistic. We'll get all the rulings that we requested and need as a condition of the transaction.
If we don't, there are a couple of options. One is that we can accept as a substitute a strong opinion of tax counsel. Obviously, we prefer the IRS to rule on the issues that are most important to us. But again, our Board could consider the alternative of the tax opinion. There's also some structural changes that we could make to depending on what the IRS feedback is, that would resolve the issue. So again, we're very bullish that this transaction gets done.
Jason Bazinet - CitiGroup Smith Barney
Okay, thank you.
Operator
And we'll take our next question today from Rich Greenfield at Pali Capital.
Richard Greenfield - Pali Capital
Hi. You talked about leverage moving up from up to 2.5 times target. Could you give us a sense of in your mind, what's the timeframe for getting to that target and what types of methods are you looking at. Is it just increasing the rate of share buyback on a weekly basis after you close the transaction? So I think you'll be out of the box for a number of weeks after your mail proxies, or is the tender offer kind of the chosen step. That's the first question.
Larry Hunter
I guess, I'd look at it in a different way which is, previously we had kind of talked about 3 to 3.5 target. And in fact, our Board said in the market environment we're in and given the all the considerations associated with our business, we think the 2.5 target is more realistic and better for the company overall.
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