Seven years, seven different one-time costs, and every single one of them genuine on its own.
Short answer
Not once the pattern spans enough years that the CATEGORY of irregular cost is itself a predictable, recurring feature of running the business — even though no individual expense type ever repeats by name. The right test is not whether this year’s item is genuine (it usually is); it is whether one item labelled non-recurring every year is itself the business’s normal cost structure, in which case the category belongs in ongoing EBITDA and should not be added back at all.
No statute or accounting standard governs the recurring-versus-non-recurring test behind an EBITDA add-back — it is a quality-of-earnings judgment tested against the business’s own multi-year financial statements, not a rule set out in law. The distinction that matters is between non-recurring in KIND (the specific expense type never repeats) and non-recurring in AMOUNT (the CATEGORY of irregular cost recurs every single year, just wearing a different name each time: a lawsuit settlement one year, storm damage the next, an ERP implementation the year after).
A single genuine one-time item, in an otherwise clean multi-year history, normalizes cleanly and should be added back. The identical claim made in year seven of seven documented “one-time” items does not — regardless of how well each individual item is documented — because the multi-year pattern is itself the evidence that the category is ordinary, recurring cost. Applied across the full window rather than year by year, that category is a predictable cost of running this business.
See it decided in the seven-years-of-non-recurring case file, the buyer-synergy EBITDA credit file and the owner-salary normalization file.
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