Tenth Circuit Reverses District Court in Sala
July 26, 2010
In a brief (and some might say terse) opinion, the Tenth Circuit has reversed the District Court in Sala v. United States, 552 F. Supp. 2d 1167 (D. Colo. 2008) (decision linked below). As many readers will recall, Sala was considered an outlier among the tax shelter cases litigated over the past few years, with the taxpayer winning at trial in a Son-of-BOSS case. See our prior discussion of the case here.
Citing to Coltec Indus., Inc. v. United States, 454 F.3d 1340, 1356 (Fed. Cir. 2006), and Black & Decker Corp. v. United States, 436 F.3d 431, 441 (4th Cir. 2006), the Tenth Circuit focused narrowly on the specific transaction that gave rise to the claimed tax benefits, thus adding to the emerging trend of using a narrow definition of the transaction to defeat the efforts of tax planners. It remains to be seen whether the Tenth Circuit and other courts will embrace Coltec as closely when confronted with more traditional tax planning, rather than a Son-of-BOSS tax shelter.
Following its own precedent and a well-established approach to analyzing economic substance, the court concluded that the loss-generating transaction lacked economic substance. In making this determination, the court considered both the taxpayer’s subjective business motivation in entering into the transaction, as well as whether the transaction had “objective economic substance.” After engaging in a “common-sense examination of the evidence as a whole,” the court found it “clear that the transaction was designed primarily to create a reportable tax loss that would almost entirely offset Sala’s [tax year] 2000 income with little actual economic risk.” The court also held that the “existence of some potential profit” is insufficient to imbue a transaction with economic substance where the purported tax benefits substantially outweigh the potential economic gains. Holding for the government on the dispositive economic substance issue, the court declined to reach any of the other issues raised.
With this decision, Sala moves from being an interesting outlier to just another case in the mainstream of tax shelter decisions. It is very unlikely that the taxpayer will be able to interest the en banc court or the Supreme Court in further review. If he wants to try, a rehearing petition would be due on September 7 and a cert petition would be due on October 21.
