Eleventh Circuit to Address Scope of Danielson Rule

With oral argument scheduled for April 18 in Peco Foods v. Commissioner, No. 12-12169, the Eleventh Circuit will soon decide a case that involves the scope of the Danielson rule.  That rule, established in Danielson v. Commissioner, 378 F.2d 771, 775 (3d Cir. 1967), provides that “a party can challenge the tax consequences of his agreement as construed by the Commissioner only by adducing proof which in an action between the parties to the agreement would be admissible to alter that construction or to show its unenforceability because of mistake, undue influence, fraud, duress, etc.”  The Eleventh Circuit has expressly adopted the Danielson rule.

In Peco Foods, the Commissioner used that rule (along with the allocation rules under section 1060) to prevent the taxpayer from subdividing broader classes of purchased assets (to which the purchase agreement had expressly allocated a portion of the purchase price) into discernible subcomponents for depreciation purposes.  The taxpayer is a poultry processor that purchased the assets at two poultry processing plants in the mid- to late-1990s.  In each of the purchase transactions, Peco and the seller agreed to allocate the purchase price among listed assets “for all purposes (including financial accounting and tax purposes).”  The first agreement allocated purchase price among 26 listed assets; the second allocated purchase price among three broad classes of assets.

Prompted by the Tax Court’s decision in Hospital Corporation of America v. Commissioner, 109 T.C. 21 (1997), Peco commissioned a cost segregation study that subdivided the listed assets into subcomponents.  Some of these subcomponents fell into asset classes that are subject to accelerated depreciation methods.  For instance, Peco subdivided the class of assets listed as “Real Property: Improvements” on the original allocation schedule into subcomponents that were tangible personal property subject to a 7- or 15-year depreciation period under section 1245.  If they were classified as structural components of nonresidential real property, the assets would have been subject to a 39-year depreciation period under section 1250.

With the segregation study in hand, Peco applied to change its accounting method for those subcomponents with its 1998 return and claimed higher depreciation deductions on subsequent returns.  The IRS disallowed these deductions and issued a notice of deficiency; the taxpayer filed a petition in Tax Court.

In a Tax Court Memorandum opinion by Judge Laro, T.C. Memo 2012-18, the Tax Court upheld the Commissioner’s deficiencies.  The Tax Court’s decision was based on both the Danielson rule and section 1060(a), the latter of which provides that if the parties in an applicable asset acquisition “agree in writing as to the allocation of any consideration,” the agreement “shall be binding on both the transferee and transferor unless the Secretary determines that such allocation . . . is not appropriate.”  The taxpayer argued that section 1060 serves only to allocate purchase price among assets under the residual method of section 338(b)(5) and that section 1060 does not bar further subdivision of the allocation for purposes of determining useful lives for depreciation.  The Tax Court held that the directive in section 1060 that an allocation by the parties “shall be binding” trumps the application of the residual method of section 338(b)(5).

The Tax Court also rejected the taxpayer’s argument that Danielson was inapposite.  The taxpayer had relied on United States v. Fort, 638 F.3d 1334 (11th Cir. 2011), in which the Eleventh Circuit held that “the Danielson rule applies if a taxpayer ‘challenge[s] the form of a transaction.’”  (citation omitted)  Since the taxpayer in Fort had challenged the specific tax consequences of the form of the transaction but not the form itself, the Eleventh Circuit found that Fort fell outside the scope of the Danielson rule.  The Tax Court held that while the taxpayer in Fort had not challenged the form of the transaction, the taxpayer in Peco—by “seeking to reallocate the purchase price among assets not listed in the original allocation schedules”—sought to challenge the form of the transaction.  Therefore, reasoned the Tax Court, because there was no ambiguity to the allocations in the purchase agreements under the applicable contract laws of the states in which the agreements were entered, Danielson applies to prevent the taxpayer from subdividing the listed into distinct components for depreciation purposes.

On appeal, the taxpayer contests the Tax Court’s holdings with respect to both section 1060 and Danielson.  In its brief, the taxpayer argues that whether an asset is tangible personal property or a structural component of a building is a matter of facts and circumstances and that the words used to describe the asset “are of no utility in connection with its categorization as a structural component.”  The taxpayer also argues that classifying assets for depreciation purposes is not a challenge to the form of the transaction (unlike, for example, treating the transaction as a merger or lease rather than an asset acquisition, which would have been a challenge to form) and therefore, under the holding in Fort, the Danielson rule does not apply.

In his opposition brief, the Commissioner echoes the Tax Court’s holding that the taxpayer’s subdivision of listed assets for depreciation purposes is an attempt to “restructure the form of the transaction” and therefore falls within the purview of the Danielson rule (and is not excluded by the rule articulated in Fort).  The Commissioner then goes a step further, arguing that the taxpayer was not merely “changing the classification of assets” but also “added assets.”  Moreover, the Commissioner insists that what the taxpayer did with respect to depreciation “goes considerably deeper than merely a change to the classification for depreciation purposes.”

Peco Foods – Tax Court Memorandum Opinion

Peco Foods – Taxpayer’s 11th Circuit Brief

Peco Foods – Commissioner’s 11th Circuit Opposition Brief

 

Home Concrete Decision Leaves Administrative Law Questions Unsettled While Excluding Overstatements of Basis from Six-Year Statute of Limitations

[A shorter version of this blog post appears on SCOTUSblog.]

The Supreme Court last week ruled 5-4 in favor of the taxpayer in Home Concrete, thus putting an end to the long-running saga of the Intermountain litigation on which we have been reporting for the past 18 months.  The opinion was authored by Justice Breyer and joined in full by three other Justices, but Justice Scalia joined only in part.  The result is a definitive resolution of the specific tax issue – the six-year statute of limitations does not apply to an overstatement of basis.  But the Court’s decision provides a much less definitive resolution of the broader administrative law issues implicated in the case.

As foreshadowed by the oral argument (see our previous report here), the tax issue turned on the continuing vitality of the Court’s decision in The Colony, Inc. v. Commissioner, 357 U.S. 28 (1958).  To recap, the Court held in Colony that the “omits from gross income” language in the 1939 Code did not encompass situations where the return understates gross income because of an overstatement of basis, and hence the extended six-year statute of limitations did not apply in those situations.  The government argued that Colony did not control the interpretation of the same language in current section 6501(e) of the 1954 Code, because changes elsewhere in that section suggested that Congress might have intended a different result in the 1954 Code.

The administrative law issues came into play because, after two courts of appeals had ruled that Colony controlled the interpretation of the 1954 Code, the government tried an end run around that precedent.  Treasury issued regulations interpreting the “omits from gross income” language in the 1954 Code as including overstatements of basis, thus bringing those situations within the six-year statute of limitations.  Under National Cable & Telecommunications Ass’n v. Brand X Internet Services, 545 U.S. 967 (2005), the government argued, an agency is empowered to issue regulations that define a statute differently than an existing court decision, so long as the court decision did not declare the statutory language unambiguous.  Because the Colony opinion had indicated that the 1939 Code language standing alone was “not unambiguous,” the government argued that Treasury’s new regulations were entitled to Chevron deference, which would supplant any precedential effect that Colony would otherwise have on the interpretation of the 1954 Code provision.

The Court’s Opinion

Justice Breyer wrote the opinion for the Court, joined in full by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Thomas.  Justice Scalia joined Justice Breyer’s analysis of the statute, but departed from his analysis of the administrative law issues.

The opinion dealt straightforwardly with the basic tax issue.  First, the Court emphasized that the critical “omits from gross income” language in the current statute is identical to the 1939 Code language construed in Colony, and it recounted the Colony Court’s reasoning that led it to conclude that the language does not encompass overstatements of basis.  Colony is determinative, the Court held, because it “would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to give the same language here a different interpretation without effectively overruling Colony, a course of action that basic principles of stare decisis wisely counsel us not to take.”  With respect to the statutory changes made elsewhere in section 6501(e), the Court concluded that “these points are too fragile to bear the significant argumentative weight the Government seeks to place upon them.”  The Court addressed each of these changes and concluded that none called for a different interpretation of the key language (and that one of the government’s arguments was “like hoping that a new batboy will change the outcome of the World Series”).

The Court then turned to the administrative law issues, reciting the government’s position that, under Brand X, the new regulations were owed deference despite the Court’s prior construction of the language in Colony.  The opinion first responded to that position with a two-sentence subsection:  “We do not accept this argument.  In our view, Colony has already interpreted the statute, and there is no longer any different construction that is consistent with Colony and available for adoption by the agency.”

Standing alone, that was not much of a response to the government’s Brand X argument, because Brand X said that the agency can adopt a construction different from that provided in a prior court decision so long as the statute was ambiguous.  These two sentences were enough for Justice Scalia, however, and he ended his agreement with Justice Breyer’s opinion at this point.  In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Scalia explained that he is adhering to the view expressed in his dissent in Brand X that an agency cannot issue regulations reinterpreting statutory language that has been definitively construed by a court.

With the other Justices in the majority not feeling free to ignore Brand X, Justice Breyer’s opinion (now a plurality opinion) then proceeded to explain why Brand X did not require a ruling for the government.  According to the plurality, Brand X should be given a more nuanced reading than that urged by the government, one that looks to whether a prior judicial decision found a statute to be “unambiguous” in the sense that the court concluded that Congress intended to leave “‘no gap for the agency to fill’ and thus ‘no room for agency discretion.’”  Under Chevron jurisprudence, the opinion continued, unambiguous statutory language provides a “clear sign” that Congress did not delegate gap-filling authority to an agency, while ambiguous language provides “a presumptive indication that Congress did delegate that gap-filling authority.”  That presumption is not conclusive, however, and thus this reading of Brand X leaves room for a court to conclude that a judicial interpretation of ambiguous statutory language can foreclose an agency from issuing a contrary regulatory interpretation.  In support of that proposition, the plurality quoted footnote 9 of Chevron, which states that “[i]f a court, employing traditional tools of statutory construction, ascertains that Congress had an intention on the precise question at issue, that intention is the law and must be given effect.”

The plurality then ruled that the Court in Colony had concluded that Congress had definitively resolved the legal issue and left no gap to be filled by a regulatory interpretation.  Given its analysis of the scope of Brand X, the plurality explained that the Colony Court’s statement (26 years before Chevron) that the statutory language was not “unambiguous” did not necessarily leave room for the agency to act.  Rather, the Colony Court’s opinion as a whole – notably, its view that the taxpayer had the better interpretation of the statutory language and had additional support from the legislative history – showed that the Court believed that Congress had not “left a gap to fill.”  Therefore, “the Government’s gap-filling regulation cannot change Colony’s interpretation of the statute,” and the Court today is obliged by stare decisis to follow it.

The Concurring and Dissenting Opinions

Justice Kennedy’s dissent, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, reached a different conclusion on the basic tax dispute.  The dissent looked at the statutory changes made in the 1954 Code and concluded that they are “meaningful” and “strongly favor” the conclusion that the “omits from gross income” language in the 1954 Code should not be read the way the Colony Court read that same language in the 1939 Code.  Given that view, the administrative law issue – and the resolution of the case – became easy.  The dissent stated that the Treasury regulations are operating on a blank slate, construing a statute different from the one construed in Colony, and therefore they are owed Chevron deference without the need to rely on Brand X at all.

Justice Scalia’s concurring opinion declared a pox on both houses.  He was extremely critical of the plurality’s approach, accusing it of “revising yet again the meaning of Chevron . . . in a direction that will create confusion and uncertainty.”  He also criticized the dissent for praising the idea of a “continuing dialogue among the three branches of Government on questions of statutory interpretation,” when the right approach should be to say that “Congress prescribes and we obey.”  Justice Scalia concluded:  “Rather than making our judicial-review jurisprudence curiouser and curiouser, the Court should abandon the opinion that produces these contortions, Brand X.  I join the judgment announced by the Court because it is indisputable that Colony resolved the construction of the statutory language at issue here, and that construction must therefore control.”

What Does It Mean?

The Home Concrete decision provides a clear resolution of the specific tax issue.  The six-year statute of limitations does not apply to overstatements of basis.  The multitude of cases pending administratively and in the courts that involve this issue will now be dismissed as untimely, leaving the IRS unable to recover what it estimated as close to $1 billion in unpaid taxes.

Indeed, in a series of orders issued on April 30, the Court has already cleared its docket of the other Intermountain-type cases that had been decided in the courts of appeals and kept alive by filing petitions for certiorari.  In Burks and the other Fifth Circuit cases in which the taxpayers had prevailed, the Court simply denied certiorari, making the taxpayers’ victory final.  For the certiorari petitions filed from courts of appeals that had sided with the government, such as Grapevine (Federal Circuit), Beard (Seventh Circuit), Salman Ranch (Tenth Circuit), and Intermountain and UTAM (D.C. Circuit), the Court granted the petitions and immediately vacated the court of appeals decisions and remanded the cases to the courts of appeals for reconsideration.  Now constrained by Home Concrete, those courts will enter judgments in favor of the taxpayers in due course.

Notably, although the retroactive nature of the Treasury regulations was a significant point of contention in the litigation, retroactivity did not play a role in the final resolution.  The Court held that Colony is controlling and leaves no room for the agency to construe the “omits from gross income” language differently.  Thus, Treasury does not have the ability to use its regulatory authority to extend the six-year statute to overstatements of basis even prospectively.  Any such extension will have to come from Congress.

The effect of the decision on administrative law generally is considerably more muddled.  First, a couple of observations on what the Court did not do.  It did not signal any retreat from Mayo.  Treasury regulations addressed to tax issues will continue to be judged under the same Chevron deference principles that apply to regulations issued by other agencies.  Furthermore, as noted above, the Court did not rely on the retroactive aspect of the regulations.  Thus, the decision does not provide guidance one way or another on the extent to which Treasury is constrained in its ability to apply regulations to earlier tax years.

What the Court did do, however, is to weaken the authority of Brand X.  Under the reasoning of Justice Breyer’s plurality opinion, courts are now free to decline to defer to a regulatory interpretation that construes ambiguous statutory language – if the court concludes that a prior court decision, using “traditional tools of statutory construction” that go beyond the text, determined that Congress intended to resolve the issue rather than leave a gap for the agency to fill.  Although there were only four votes for that proposition, Justice Scalia’s approach would lead him to agree with such a result just as he did in Home Concrete, so lower courts may treat the plurality opinion as controlling.  There is, however, room for debate about the impact of the Home Concrete approach.  Justice Breyer’s opinion emphasizes the fact that Colony was decided long before Chevron, and lower courts may disagree regarding its impact when the court decision at issue is post-Chevron and, in particular, post-Brand X.  At a minimum, the Home Concrete decision should make agencies less confident in their ability to use regulations to overturn judicial interpretations of statutes and should give taxpayers more ammunition to challenge such regulations if necessary.

Interestingly, Justice Breyer’s approach, and in particular his invocation of Chevron’s footnote 9 reference to “traditional tools of statutory construction,” was previewed in the argument in the Federal Circuit in the Grapevine case.  As we reported at the time, that argument involved considerable discussion of whether the determination of “ambiguous” at Chevron step 1 must be based entirely on the statutory text, as Brand X suggests, or can be based on other “traditional tools of statutory construction,” as Chevron footnote 9 declares.  In its decision, the Federal Circuit stuck to the statutory text and ruled for the government.

Justice Breyer’s opinion, however, supports the proposition that Chevron step 1 analysis can look beyond the statutory text.  If that portion of Justice Breyer’s opinion had commanded a majority, it would be extremely significant because it would justify looking beyond the statutory text not only in assessing the impact of Brand X when there is a court decision on the books, but also in considering a Chevron deference argument in the first instance.  A court could decide, under the approach suggested by Justice Breyer, that a statute whose text standing alone is ambiguous nonetheless leaves no room for agency interpretation – if other tools of statutory construction show that Congress intended to resolve the issue rather than leaving a gap for the agency.  On this point, however, the plurality opinion cannot be treated as controlling because Justice Scalia would surely look askance at a decision that used legislative history to find a lack of ambiguity at Chevron Step 1.  By the same token, the dissenters had no occasion to address this point, so we do not know if any of them would have agreed with Justice Breyer’s approach.  For now, it is fair to say that Justice Breyer has heightened the visibility and potential importance of Chevron footnote 9, but that Home Concrete alone probably will not yield a significant change in how courts approach Chevron step 1.

In sum, Home Concrete may be a bit of a disappointment to those observers who thought that the decision would bring great clarity to the administrative law issues presented.  In that respect, it joins a long list of administrative law cases that reach the Supreme Court and seem to yield as many questions as answers.  But for the taxpayers with millions of dollars riding on the difference between a three-year and six-year statute of limitations, the decision is not disappointing at all.  It is a huge victory.

Supreme Court opinion in Home Concrete

Government Decides Against Further Review in Washington Mutual

As we previously reported, the Ninth Circuit in Washington Mutual reversed the district court and ruled that the taxpayer did have basis in regulatory rights that it received in connection with a transaction in which it took over failed thrifts during the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s.  The government has now allowed the periods for seeking rehearing and certiorari to expire without taking action.  The Ninth Circuit’s decision is therefore final, and the case will move on to further proceedings on remand in the district court to determine the amount of basis.

The Ninth Circuit Rejects the Government’s Effort to Disregard “Economic Realities” in Washington Mutual

[Note:  Miller & Chevalier is counsel to Washington Mutual in this case.]

In the past decade, the government has often defeated taxpayer claims that tax benefits flowed from certain transactions on the grounds that the economic substance of the transactions did not justify the tax benefits and that the taxpayer’s contrary arguments reflect a hypertechnical reading of the rules.  In Washington Mutual Inc. v. United States (9th Cir. No. 09-36109), the proverbial shoe was on the other foot.  A key element of the taxpayer’s business transaction was the receipt of regulatory rights in exchange for incurring the cost of relieving the government of impending liabilities.  The government argued, however, that, with respect to determining basis in those intangible assets, technical requirements in the reorganization rules trumped the economic reality that the taxpayer had purchased those rights.  The Ninth Circuit rejected that argument and ruled for the taxpayer. 

The controversy stemmed from an acquisition by Washington Mutual’s predecessor, Home Savings, of three failed thrifts during the savings and loan crisis of the early 1980s.  In part due to skyrocketing interest rates, many thrifts at that time had deposit liabilities that exceeded the value of their assets.  The policy of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) was to encourage healthy thrifts to acquire such failed thrifts in what were called “supervisory mergers,” which would spare FSLIC the liability it would otherwise incur if it had to liquidate the thrifts and pay off its insurance obligation to depositors.  In this case, the primary inducement offered to Home to convince it to enter into what would otherwise have been a losing proposition was a pair of regulatory rights (the right to open branches in other states and the right to the accounting treatment for regulatory purposes that was involved in United States v. Winstar Corp., 518 U.S. 839 (1996)). 

Home indisputably incurred a cost in getting FSLIC off the hook in this way because Home inherited the failed thrifts’ net liabilities.  Arguing that the transaction was in substance a purchase of regulatory rights, Washington Mutual contended that basic tax principles dictated that Home took a cost basis in the acquired assets – that is, the two regulatory rights.  Alternatively, Washington Mutual argued that the assets could have a fair market value basis, through the operation of Code section 597, if they were viewed as FSLIC assistance rather than as the object of a purchase.  The government objected to both theories on technical grounds.  It argued that the assignment of a carryover basis to the thrift assets under the “G” reorganization rules precluded assigning a cost basis to the regulatory rights.  And it raised a variety of hypertechnical textual objections to application of section 597.  The district court agreed with the government, holding that the regulatory rights had no basis at all.

The Ninth Circuit reversed in an opinion authored by Judge Betty Fletcher and joined by Judge Bybee, holding that Home took a cost basis in the regulatory rights.  The opinion began by emphasizing the “overarching principle” that, “absent specific provisions, the tax consequences of any particular transaction must reflect the economic reality.”  In this case, “the economic realities of the transaction” were that Home engaged in one “all-encompassing transaction” in which it acquired the failed thrifts and received the regulatory rights as “part of the consideration.”  The majority explained that the government’s argument based on the “G” reorganization rules did not respect the economic reality of this “all-encompassing transaction,” and the majority concluded that those rules were “not incompatible” with the conclusion that Home took a cost basis in the regulatory rights.  In sum, the majority ruled that the tax treatment should follow the economic reality that Home did not acquire the regulatory rights in the “G” reorganization but rather purchased the rights from FSLIC and paid for them by allowing the thrifts, which had negative value, to merge into Home.

Given its ruling on cost basis, the majority did not address the alternative theory that Home took a fair market value basis through the operation of Code section 597.  Judge Fernandez, however, found that theory more persuasive, and he concurred in the reversal of the district court on that ground (remarking that he therefore had “no need to wrestle with” the cost basis question).  Like the majority, he concluded that the government’s technical theories were unsound and could not justify disregarding the economics of the transaction.  “Home Savings greatly benefitted the government at a time of great need,” and “it was given the [regulatory] Rights as part of the inducement to do so. . . .  Whether one accepts the analysis of the majority or mine, the result is that Home Savings did have a basis in them.”

The Ninth Circuit’s decision is a welcome reminder that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  In the words of the majority opinion, when a taxpayer enters into a transaction that “has economic substance and is economically realistic,” the taxpayer should benefit from the accompanying tax treatment provided under the law.

The briefs and opinions in the case are linked below.

If the government decides to seek rehearing of the Ninth Circuit’s decision, its petition would be due on April 18.

Washington Mutual – Ninth Circuit Opinion

Washington Mutual – Taxpayer Opening Brief

Washington Mutual – U.S. brief

Washington Mutual – Taxpayer Reply Brief

Washington Mutual – District Court Opinion