Question-and-Answer Session
Thank you as a reminder if you like to post a question [Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from Jonathan Arnold of Merrill Lynch, please go ahead.
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
Good morning guys.
Matthew F. Hilzinger - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Good morning.
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
My question relates to tax and when I look at the face of the operating income statement it seems like the effective rate for the quarter was around 31% normally seems to be kind of more like 37. And any was that effectively baked into guidance for the year or could you just I know you called out $0.03 of tax differential, I think that difference in the rate would put the number more like $0.08, any color on that would be helpful.
Matthew F. Hilzinger - Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
John, I'll answer that. It's a very good question. It's really driven by two things, the recently effective tax rate down is in part due to the state tax settlements that we are in discussion with and that's bringing it down, and the second there is the walk that we took on the realized disposition of the assets in the New Jersey Commissioning Trust. That $0.03 actually gets juiced up a little bit more. You get a little bit more tax deduction for that, and those two things really brought the effective tax rate from about 37.5% down to 31%. So, was it based in the guidance? I think when you look at the quarter, if you are kind of nibbling on quality of earnings, if you look at kind of the tax benefit we got, compared to loss on the decommissioning trust and PPO from last year, I think they pretty much wash out. So I think from a quality of earnings standpoint, I think we feel pretty good about, in fact we feel very good about where the quarter is ending. So, we can get into it later on after this call if you want to get into a little bit more of how the decommissioning loss works from a tax basis, we can do that. I think Tom and Terry our tax guys will be happy to walk you through that. Is there any other question Jonathan?
Jonathan Arnold - Merrill Lynch
Yeah, can I slide in one other?
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