Income Taxes

Current period U.S. and foreign loss before income taxes as well as income tax expense (benefit) were as follows:



	Three Months Ended September 30,						Nine Months Ended September 30,
	2014			2013			2014			2013
	(In thousands)
Loss from continuing operations before income taxes:
U.S.	$	(972	)	$	(5,667	)	$	(2,061	)	$	(3,672	)
Foreign	(19,348		)	(8,308		)	(14,626		)	(1,335		)
Total	$	(20,320	)	$	(13,975	)	$	(16,687	)	$	(5,007	)

Income tax expense (benefit):
U.S.	$	1,070		$	550		$	3,121		$	2,930
Foreign	(606		)	(1,012		)	2,079			1,192
Total	$	464		$	(462	)	$	5,200		$	4,122

Due to our history of domestic losses, we have a full valuation allowance for all U.S. net deferred tax assets, including our net operating loss and tax credit carryforwards. As a result, we cannot record any tax benefits for additional U.S. incurred losses and any U.S. income is offset by a reduction in valuation allowance. Irrespective of our income or loss levels, we continue to record U.S. deferred tax expense related to tax-basis goodwill amortization.

The effective rate on our foreign tax expense varies with the mix of income and losses across multiple tax jurisdictions with most statutory tax rates varying from 21% to 34%. The foreign tax expense was higher than the normal effective rate as the result of establishing a valuation allowance against the deferred tax assets and current year losses of our operations in the Netherlands and the recognition of reserves for certain tax exposure items. In addition, the difference between the effective tax rate and statutory tax rates resulted from losses in jurisdictions where we received no tax benefit due to a valuation allowance.