City Nat. Bank v. Charles Baker Co.

• Decision Date: 18 October 1901
• Citation: 61 N.E. 223,180 Mass. 40
• Parties: CITY NAT. BANK v. CHARLES BAKER CO. (CITY OF WORCESTER, Intervener).
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

180 Mass. 40

61 N.E. 223

CITY NAT. BANK v. CHARLES BAKER CO. (CITY OF WORCESTER, Intervener).

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Worcester.

October 18, 1901

COUNSEL

T. H. Gage, Jr., for receiver.

Arthur P. Rugg and E. I. Morgan, for intervener.

OPINION

HOLMES, C.J.

It does not appear precisely what the nature of the present suit is. But it sufficiently appears that the property of the defendant company is in the hands of a receiver, and that the city of Worcester seeks by the petition before us to make him pay a tax assessed to him upon that property, so far as it is personal. The real estate and machinery were assessed to the defendant corporation until they were sold. The question is whether a receiver is taxable for personal property of a corporation in his hands. In order to make him so of course a statute must be shown which by a fair construction covers his case.

Chapter 165 of the Acts of 1882 taxing property held by assignees in insolvency, bankruptcy, or for the benefit of creditors under a voluntary assignment, plainly does not extend to receivers by any possible construction of its words, and therefore we lay that on one said. No one knows better than the intelligent counsel for the city the vanity of the suggestion that a tax may be sustained as within the spirit of a statute, if it is not covered by the words. The only other section upon which the city relies is Pub. St. c. 11, § 20. To bring the case within some clause of that section the city has to contend and does contend that the receiver is the owner of personal property in his hands. But we regard it as too well settled for argument that a receiver is not owner unless an assignment is executed for the purpose of making him so, or a statute gives to his appointment an effect which it is beyond the power of a court of equity to give. Ellis v. Railroad Co., 107 Mass. 1, 28; Wilson v. Welch, 157 Mass. 77, 80, 31 N.E. 712; Hayward v Leeson, 176 Mass. 310, 325, 57 N.E. 656, 49 L. R. A 725; Union Bank of Chicago v. Kansas City Bank, 136 U.S. 223, 236, 10 S.Ct. 1013, 34 L.Ed. 341; Portman v Mill, 8 Law J. Ch. 161, 165; Bank v. Risley, 19 N.Y. 369, 371, 75 Am. Dec. 347. There is no more reason for regarding the receiver as owner of the personal than of the real estate, and the city recognized that the defendant company still owned the latter by assessing it for a tax, which has been paid.

The only difficulty in the case arises from the fact that before May 1, 1900, the property had been sold, turned into money and deposited in banks, a part, to be sure, in the name of the company, but a part in the name of the receiver as such. As to this last it might be argued that when money is put into a bank the depositor is only a creditor, and that the creditor must have the legal title to the debt, as he is the one to sue at law to collect it. If he has the legal title, although only as trustee, it may be said, he is liable to a tax. When we get close to the line of legal distinctions, technicalities often necessarily determine the precise place of division, although the general nature of the distinction depends upon larger considerations. Nevertheless it would be a matter for regret if a technicality having no relation to the policy of the law principally concerned should make the difference as to whether that law applied or not. If the statutes do not mean to tax identified money in the hands of a receiver when he locks it up in his box in the safety vault of a bank, naturally their policy would be to...