Government Brief Filed in PPL
May 23, 2011
The government has filed its brief in the Third Circuit in PPL. The brief is virtually identical to the brief filed a few weeks ago in the Fifth Circuit in Entergy that addresses the same issue of the creditability of the U.K. Windfall Tax under Code section 901. See our initial report here. The only significant differences are addressing PPL’s facts instead of Entergy’s and placing more weight on Third Circuit precedent instead of Fifth Circuit precedent. The essence of the government’s argument is that the section 901 determination should be based entirely on the text of the foreign statute, and therefore the Tax Court erred in considering extrinsic evidence of how the tax operates. Because the U.K. statute uses the term “profit-making value,” the government says that it is a tax on “value,” not an “income” tax, and therefore it should not be creditable.
PPL’s brief is due June 9.