mine life, page-20

my take is what you are seeing is some rather astute tax planning.
The mill was written down to around $1.5M by the previous owner Intrepid from my hazy memory therefore NST has little room in claiming depreciation on plant. Untill now it has been able to book virtually no profit as it was paying a royalty to Intrepid as mine payment so didnt have a tax problem

Now it is in a fix it has a large EBIT which will mean a large tax bill (as it has no interest payments now either). It does have a number of years of losses which can be offest against current profits but that to is a finite tax offset.

What it can do to reduce/defer tax is claim exploration expenses as an operating expense rather than being ammortised as a capital item. Dont know if they are doing this but it is what SLR are doing which gives them an artifically high OPEX per ounce of Au compared to other goldies.
I am not an accountant just a punter so take what I have written with a grain of salt.
If they show no profit but resource ounces dramaticly increase it would be a great outcome IMHO, compared with all the exporers who keep getting placements to get more resource ozs.