Briefing Complete in Mazzei
May 20, 2019
The taxpayers have filed their reply brief in Mazzei, completing the briefing. The reply brief is colorful–perhaps to a fault–in critiquing the government’s arguments. For example: the issue is whether a Roth IRA can hold stock in a DISC “without suffering multitudinous nasties at the hands of the Commissioner”; the government’s arguments are “disingenuous” and “odd” and the Tax Court performed “judicial alchemy”; and the cases cited by the government are “as devoid of landing space herein as Noah’s crow” [actually a raven, according to the King James Bible].
Looking beyond the rhetoric, which is unlikely to make a favorable impression on the Ninth Circuit judges, the reply brief makes the same basic points as the opening brief. See our prior reports here. It argues that the transaction in question fully complied with the Code and is materially indistinguishable from the Summa Holdings/Benenson transaction that has survived IRS challenges in three other circuits. The government’s position assertedly boils down to arguing that “the tax result was too good to be true,” and that argument does not respect Congress’s decision to allow the use of the FSC structure. And the taxpayers state that the cases the government relies upon are “inappropriate to the unique characteristics inherent” in a FSC.
Oral argument is yet to be scheduled and likely will not occur for several months.
Third Circuit Affirms Subpart F Income Inclusion Ruling in SIH Partners
May 7, 2019
A unanimous Third Circuit this morning affirmed the Tax Court in SIH Partners in an opinion that will please government lawyers who are increasingly dealing with APA challenges to Treasury regulations. As explained in our previous posts here, the issue in SIH Partners was whether loan guarantees by two CFCs resulted in income exclusions, even though the guarantees were not equivalent to an actual repatriation because, among other things, there were many other guarantors. Because the regulations on their face set forth a bright-line rule that takes no account of the individual circumstances of particular loan guarantees, the taxpayer argued that the regulations were invalid under the APA as arbitrary and capricious.
The Third Circuit noted “the Tax Court’s masterful analysis rejecting” the taxpayer’s challenge to the validity of the regulations, but it then stated that it did not need to rely on that analysis because the taxpayer’s argument failed for another reason. The court said that the taxpayer, in arguing that a bright-line rule treating all loan guarantees the same was unreasonable, had pointed to IRS administrative guidance issued over the years that relaxed the rule depending on the circumstances. The taxpayer, therefore, was asking the court to use “hindsight” in violation of the established rule that the validity of an agency action must be assessed based on the administrative record that was before the agency at the time. The court did not dispute that experience under the regulation might have demonstrated that “the regulations do not always address economic reality,” but it found that fact immaterial. The court declared: “We cannot and will not find half-century old regulations arbitrary and capricious, based on insights gained in the decades after their promulgation, when the challenger . . . has not made a showing that those insights were known or, perhaps, at least should have been known to the agency at the time of the regulations’ promulgation.” Indeed, the court said that the taxpayer’s argument would be better characterized as complaining about the IRS’s failure to amend the regulations to meet the “later observed economic realities,” instead of a complaint that the regulations were arbitrary when first promulgated. Since no one requested that the IRS amend the regulations, the court said, this argument could go nowhere.
The court’s “hindsight” criticism seems unfair, as the essence of the taxpayer’s argument was not that the administrative guidance was itself a later event that called for amending the regulations, but rather evidence of an obvious flaw in the bright-line regulation as promulgated that Treasury should have recognized from the start. The court acknowledged that the taxpayer had made this point in oral argument, but simply responded that regulations do not have to be “the most perfect solution possible.” In the court’s view, the regulation set forth a “straight-forward” rule that comported with the statutory language and hence was not arbitrary. The court added that no commenter at the time raised “the possibility of multiple-counting of loan guarantors being an issue with the regulations.” That suggested that this practice was “exceedingly rare” at the time, which meant that it was hardly unreasonable for the regulation not to address it at the time.
The court then went on to make a couple more observations that may well find their way into briefs in future cases raising APA challenges to regulations. The taxpayer had argued that the bright-line rule of the regulation was inconsistent with the policy of the statute, which was to address loan guarantees that were effectively repatriations. The court did not take issue with the taxpayer’s description of the statutory policy. Instead, it remarked that “we are satisfied that the regulations are not arbitrary or capricious merely because they may not adhere to the policies embodied in the statutes in every case.” The court also gave short shrift to the taxpayer’s contention that the regulations lacked enough explanation to satisfy the State Farm requirement of “reasoned decisionmaking.” The court stated: “Because the challenged regulations barely rocked the statutory boat [that is, they closely tracked the statutory language], and because of the lack of public commentary and the straight-forward nature of the regulations, little explanation was needed.”
As to the second issue in the case, the court held that the taxpayer was not entitled to the lower tax rate applicable to dividends. Like the Fifth Circuit in Rodriguez v. Commissioner, 722 F.3d 306 (5th Cir. 2013) (see our reports here), the court held that the fact that the payment could be analogized to a dividend did not actually make it a dividend.
A petition for rehearing is due in 45 days, and, if rehearing is not sought, a petition for certiorari is due in 90 days. The prospects for the taxpayer to get a favorable result from either of those avenues of further review are probably pretty slim.
Third Circuit Decision in SIH Partners
Both Parties Face Tough Questions in Amazon.com Ninth Circuit Argument
May 1, 2019
As we previewed here, the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument in Amazon.com v. Commissioner on Friday, April 12. Before giving a detailed recap of that oral argument, some background on the dispute is in order.
The Primary Issue in Dispute
Amazon.com, the U.S. parent company (Amazon US), entered into a qualified cost-sharing agreement with its Luxembourg subsidiary (AEHT) in 2005. Amazon US contributed the intangible assets required to operate its European website business to that cost-sharing agreement. Then effective Treas. Reg. § 1.482-7(g)(2) provided that AEHT owed Amazon US a buy-in payment for the “pre-existing intangibles” that Amazon US contributed. Although AEHT made a buy-in payment for that contribution of over $100 million, the IRS determined that the buy-in should have been $2.7 billion higher.
At trial, the parties submitted competing valuations of the contributed pre-existing intangibles—the taxpayer used comparable uncontrolled transactions (CUTs) to separately price the website technology, marketing intangibles, and European customer information that Amazon US contributed; the Commissioner used a discounted-cash-flow (DCF) method to determine the present value of the projected future income that AEHT would earn using the contributed intangibles. Underlying the methodological differences between the parties, however, is a fundamental dispute about the scope of the pre-existing intangibles for which AEHT owed a buy-in payment.
The taxpayer’s position was that AEHT owed a buy-in payment for only those intangibles enumerated in the definition of “intangible” in Treas. Reg. § 1.482-4(b), which definition does not expressly include so-called “residual” business assets like goodwill and going-concern value, and that the taxpayer’s CUT method accurately priced the enumerated intangibles that Amazon US contributed. The Commissioner argued that despite not explicitly naming residual business assets, any such assets are included in the definition of “intangible” in Treas. Reg. § 1.482-4(b)(6) and that only his DCF method captured the value of those residual business assets. He also argued that the bundle of compensable pre-existing intangibles that Amazon US made available in the cost-sharing arrangement included its “culture of continuous innovation” and other unspecified “growth options.”
Treas. Reg. § 1.482-4(b) provides that “[f]or purposes of section 482, an intangible is an asset that comprises any of the following items and has substantial value independent of the services of any individual—” and then lists 28 specified intangibles in the first five subparagraphs (like patents and trademarks) and concludes with a sixth subparagraph that states that the definition encompasses “[o]ther similar items.” That subparagraph goes on to say that “[f]or purposes of section 482, an item is considered similar to those listed in paragraph (b)(1) through (5) of this section if it derives its value not from its physical attributes but from its intellectual content or other intangible properties.”
The Tax Court sided with the taxpayer’s reading of Treas. Reg. § 1.482-4(b), concluding that the Commissioner’s DCF included the value of residual business assets that were not “pre-existing intangibles” under the cost-sharing regulations. The Tax Court made some material adjustments to the taxpayer’s CUTs, ultimately finding that AEHT owed a higher buy-in, albeit nowhere near the size of the Commissioner’s proposed adjustment. The government appealed the Tax Court’s decision on legal grounds, arguing that the pertinent Treasury Regulations do not foreclose the DCF method that was the basis for the Commissioner’s adjustments. The government argued in its brief that “[t]he Treasury Regulations broadly define intangibles and do not exclude residual-business assets from the scope of the buy-in requirement.” Oral argument at the Ninth Circuit was held before the three-judge panel of Judges Fletcher, Callahan, and Christen. (The video is available here.)
Plain Language of the Regulation
Government counsel started oral argument by asserting that the plain language of Treas. Reg. § 1.482-4(b) favored the government’s position because the regulatory definition of “intangible” was so broad that it must include residual business assets like “growth options” and “corporate culture.” In support, she argued that the sixth regulatory category of “other similar items” is “written so broadly to include any item that derives its value from anything other than physical attributes.”
Amazon’s counsel responded that the government’s argument proves too much. If the definition of “intangible” truly encompassed any asset that is not tangible, then it would belie the regulation’s enumeration of 28 items that count as “intangibles” under the regulatory definition. As Amazon argued in its brief, “[i]f Treasury intended to capture all intangibles, there would have been no reason to specify any particular types of intangibles, let alone list 28 of them.” Amazon’s brief went on to argue that the court should be guided by the interpretive canon of ejusdem generis. That canon requires the court to “focus ‘on the common attribute’ of the list of items that precedes the catch-all.”
This meant, however, that Amazon’s counsel had to explain what that “common attribute” is. He argued that the 28 listed items share characteristics that the residual business assets do not have—the 28 listed items are independently transferable and created by expenditures, but residual intangibles are not independent of the business and are the product of the operation’s income-producing success. As for why the list includes only items that are independently transferable, taxpayer’s counsel argued that only those assets that can be transferred independent of the entire business are susceptible to valuation while residual business assets like goodwill or so-called “growth options” were inextricable from the entire business and impossible to value with any precision.
But the panel questioned Amazon’s invocation of ejusdem generis. Judge Callahan asked why the court should apply that canon here where the regulation defines what it means to be similar (providing that “an item is considered similar to those listed in paragraph (b)(1) through (5) of this section if it derives its value not from its physical attributes but from its intellectual content or other intangible properties”). And in his only remarks of the day, Judge Fletcher called the taxpayer’s ejusdem generis argument “somewhat peculiar.” He went on to remark that he understood Amazon counsel’s explanation of what the 28 enumerated items had in common “but it’s not the one the text gives me,” going on to state that if he were “a pure textualist, you lose.” (Judge Fletcher’s remarks may not indicate how he will vote; he prefaced his remarks with the assertion that “I’m not sure that in the end that I would disagree with your position.”)
The description of “other similar items” was not the only regulatory language that drew the panel’s attention. Judge Christen questioned government counsel about how to reconcile the government’s reading of “other similar items” to include residual business assets like “corporate culture” with the regulation’s limitation that the universe of intangibles was limited to only those assets that have “substantial value independent of the services of any individual.” (That language played a role in the Tax Court’s decision; it found that residual business assets like goodwill and growth options “often do not have ‘substantial value independent of the services of any individual.’”) Amazon made the same point in its brief, arguing that its purported “culture of innovation” is “inseparable from the individuals in the company’s workforce.” And Judge Christen appeared unmoved by government counsel’s attempt to explain away that language by arguing that while the “value” of the intangible needs to be independent of services, the “intangible itself” does not need to be independent and that other expressly listed items—like “know-how”—were not entirely independent of services.
Regulatory History
Taxpayer’s counsel attacked the government’s case as based on reading the regulatory language in the abstract, divorced entirely from its context and history. The applicable definition of “intangibles” in Treas. Reg. § 1.482-4(b) was the result of regulatory changes in 1994. Before making those regulatory changes, Treasury asked for comments on whether it should “expand” the definition of “intangibles” to include observed assets like goodwill and going concern. It received comments that the definition should not be expanded, and when Treasury issued revised regulations, it noted that it added language to the “other similar items” subparagraph but described the change as a “clarifi[cation].” Amazon’s counsel recounted this history and argued that since Treasury acknowledged that the definition would have to be expanded to include residual business assets, “Treasury could not thereafter ‘clarify’ that these intangibles had been included all along.” This was, in the words of taxpayer’s counsel, a classic case of “regulator’s remorse.”
In questioning government counsel, both Judge Callahan and Judge Christen recounted the same regulatory history and observed that Treasury asked if it should expand the definition and ultimately called its change a clarification. Judge Callahan asked whether the government could point the panel to specific language where Treasury said it intended to expand its definition to include residual business assets.
Government counsel acknowledged that Treasury used the word “clarified” in the preamble but offered a different history of the regulatory language. She argued that some initial Treasury guidance included “goodwill, consumer acceptance, and market share” as intangibles (all of which could not be transferred independent of the business) and pointed to other statutory changes and another court decision as narrowing the definition beyond what Treasury initially intended.
Government counsel also had to explain why, if Treasury had in fact expanded the definition of “intangibles” to include residual business assets, it did so by amending the definition of “other similar items” rather than just adding residual business assets to the list. She argued that Treasury opted for the latter because merely listing residual business assets like “goodwill” would just precipitate fights about whether intangibles (like the so-called “growth options” that the government says Amazon US contributed to its cost-sharing agreement) fell within the scope of the listed residual business assets. Judge Callahan acknowledged that potential issue but replied that if Treasury had expressly included “goodwill” or “going concern” the taxpayers “wouldn’t have had as good of an argument” that the disputed residual business assets here are excluded, and government counsel conceded that it was less likely that the taxpayer would have won below in that circumstance.
Subsequent Statutory Changes
In the tax reform legislation enacted in 2017 (the TCJA), Congress took steps to address the concern that government counsel raised at oral argument—the transfer of residual business assets without compensation. Congress amended section 936(h) (which is the operative definition of “intangible” for purposes of section 482 by cross-reference) to expressly include goodwill and going concern. Government counsel acknowledged that with the TCJA, “Congress has codified our interpretation of” the “other similar items” provision.
Judge Callahan observed that Congress did not say that they were clarifying what has always been true, and government counsel agreed. And Judge Callahan rehearsed Amazon’s argument that if Congress needed to amend that definition, then it’s reasonable to infer that—contrary to the government’s interpretation—the definition did not always include those residual business assets. She then gave Amazon’s counsel the opportunity to identify what he thought was the best indication in the legislative history that the statutory addition of goodwill and going concern value is a revision and not a clarification of the definition of “intangible.” He answered that the best indicator is the conference report’s description of the change as a “revision” of the definition. He then went on to argue that given the statutory language, no one could “realistically think that isn’t a vast shift” in the definition’s scope. And he added that because the TCJA effected an enormous rewrite to the Code, it is only reasonable to think that the change to add goodwill and going concern was a substantial revision.
But the legislative change did not categorically favor Amazon’s case. Although Judge Christen remarked that the legislative history for the TCJA change is “compelling,” she pressed Amazon’s counsel on the tension between, on the one hand, the new statutory requirement to include the value of goodwill and going concern as pre-existing intangibles and, on the other hand, Amazon’s argument that Treasury opted to exclude those assets from the definition of “intangibles” because they are “impossible” to value independent of the entire business. And government counsel tried to capitalize on this tension in her rebuttal, arguing that although it is difficult to value residual business assets, the DCF—which values all intangibles together—is the panacea to this problem and that is why the government seeks the Ninth Circuit’s endorsement of that method.
Cost Sharing and the Arm’s-Length Standard
One cornerstone of government counsel’s argument was that the government’s interpretation of the definition of intangible must be correct because “nothing of value can be transferred for free.” And the government—both on brief and in oral argument—made much of the taxpayer’s expert’s admission on cross-examination that parties at arm’s length would have paid for all the value associated with residual business assets because “‘no company is going to give away something of value without compensation.’” The government tried to tie this admission in with the arm’s length principle that is the lodestar of section 482. The government argued on brief that the Tax Court was “not free to disregard” the arm’s-length principle, which meant, according to the government, that the Tax Court was required to adopt a valuation that included residual business assets.
Amazon observed in its brief, however, that the arm’s-length principle also arguably supports its position. The Commissioner conceded that residual business assets “generally cannot be transferred independently from the business enterprise” and thus are not independently transferred in an arm’s-length transaction (absent the extraordinary alternative of selling the entire business), thus making it all the more plausible to think that Treasury did not contemplate taxpayers valuing them and paying a buy-in for those residual business assets in a cost-sharing agreement.
At oral argument, taxpayer’s counsel observed that the government’s argument is hard to reconcile with the very existence of the safe harbor created by the cost-sharing regulations. He argued that those regulations contemplated precisely what happened here—AEHT paid a buy-in for static intangibles, the parties shared R&D and other costs for developing new and better intangibles going forward “in a way that’s formulaic,” and then the parties benefitted from those co-developed intangibles according to that formula. Government counsel flatly disputed the notion that the 1986 and 1994 changes created a safe-harbor for cost-sharing arrangements. Although it didn’t receive significant attention at oral argument, whether the Ninth Circuit agrees with the taxpayer or the government on this point might be pivotal in the outcome.
The Nature and Life of the Residual Business Assets
One interesting feature of the government’s argument—both on brief and at oral argument—was its attempt to articulate the precise nature of the residual business assets that Amazon US transferred to its cost-sharing agreement “for free.” Counsel closely hewed to the brief’s description of those assets in oral argument, saying that the “other similar items” category was broad enough to include residual business assets like “growth options” and “corporate culture” (although the latter of these raises the obvious question of whether that culture can be independent of the services of any individual).
Amazon raised other problems with these purported assets in its brief, including the observation that the residual business assets (at least as the government conceives them) have apparently perpetual useful lives. If the government were to conceive of the assets as having unlimited useful lives, then its theory runs headlong into caselaw and the common-sense notion that no asset, however valuable, lasts forever. The government nevertheless bit the bullet on this issue, arguing in its brief that “[q]uite simply, existing technology begets new technology.” Judge Christen asked government counsel to answer for this position, and government counsel conceded that the government’s argument assumes perpetual lives for “certain assets in the bundle,” stating that under the government’s theory, “the corporate culture will last as long as the corporation is there.” But government counsel tried to downplay this concession, arguing that the terminal value of the perpetual assets was very small and that the Tax Court could have done with those residual assets what it had done with some marketing intangibles in the case—limit their useful lives to something like 20 years.
Taxpayer’s counsel reminded the panel of this useful-life problem in the context of responding to the government allegations that taxpayer transferred assets to the cost-sharing agreement for free. He argued that the Tax Court assigned substantial value to the intangibles that Amazon US contributed to the cost-sharing agreement, and in so doing, characterized those assets “static intangibles” with values that will ultimately dissipate.
Other Issues
A couple of other items from oral argument are worth noting. First, the government had argued on brief that the IRS’s interpretation of the regulation was owed deference. Perhaps wary that this deference principle may disappear in a few months when the Supreme Court decides the Kisor case (see our reports here), government counsel was quick to downplay that argument when Judge Callahan probed the topic: “That is a back-up argument; I don’t think the court needs to get there.” And the panel took issue with the fact that the government had no argument for the reasonableness of the IRS’s interpretation other than pointing to Congress’s 2017 change to the pertinent law as after-the-fact evidence. It was clear that deference argument did not sit well with Judge Callahan or Judge Christen, both of whom questioned how taxpayers were conceivably on notice of the interpretation of “other similar items” that the government was advocating in this case.
Second, Judge Callahan expressed a keen interest in how the court’s decision would affect other taxpayers, including those without Amazon’s “firepower.” Government counsel conceded that if the government were to prevail, the IRS could pursue other taxpayers using the Ninth Circuit’s interpretation of the 1994 regulations. Amazon’s counsel argued that the “entire business community” relied on the understanding that residual business assets were not compensable and structured their cost-sharing arrangements accordingly. But when the panel asked whether a reversal would affect taxpayers in all years before the TCJA, he acknowledged that the 2009 changes to the cost-sharing regulations that require a buy-in for “platform contributions,” which arguably already include some residual business assets.
Finally, at oral argument, government counsel repeatedly raised the “realistic alternatives” principle (which is now part of section 482 and was in the 482 regulations already), arguing that principle is “central to the arm’s-length standard” because no entity is going to accept a price that is less than one of its realistic alternatives and that the Tax Court’s opinion amounted to a “rewriting” of that principle. But on brief, the government posed no alternative transaction that achieved the ends of the cost-sharing agreement. Instead, it argued that the “realistic alternative” to the cost-sharing arrangement was “not entering into the cost-sharing arrangement and continuing to operate the European Business as it had before.” The taxpayer’s brief took this point head on, arguing that the regulations implementing the realistic-alternatives principle “did not allow the Commissioner to consider alternatives to cost-sharing itself.” The Tax Court had rejected the Commissioner’s argument at trial, finding that empowering the Commissioner to use the realistic-alternatives principle to price the transaction as if it never happened at all would “make the cost sharing election, which the regulations explicitly make available to taxpayers, altogether meaningless.”
On balance, the panel’s questions and remarks appear to favor affirmance of the Tax Court. But both parties faced hard questions at oral argument. There is no deadline for the court’s ruling, and it will likely be several months before a decision is issued.
