Uptegrove Lumber Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Rev.
| Decision Date | 29 June 1953 |
| Docket Number | No. 10933.,10933. |
| Citation | 204 F.2d 570 |
| Parties | UPTEGROVE LUMBER CO. v. COMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit |
Alvin D. Lurie, New York City (Jacob Rabkin and Mark H. Johnson, New York City, on the brief), for appellant.
Robert B. Ross, Washington, D. C. (H. Brian Holland, Asst. Atty. Gen., Ellis N. Slack, Robert N. Anderson, Sp. Assts. to the Atty. Gen., on the brief), for appellee.
Before KALODNER, STALEY, and HASTIE, Circuit Judges.
The Commissioner of Internal Revenue assessed a deficiency in the taxpayer's 1944 income and excess profits tax more than three years but less than five after taxpayer had filed its 1944 return. This delay has necessitated a determination whether the normal three-year statute of limitations, Section 275(a) of the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. § 275(a), or the longer five-year period made applicable to certain deficiency claims by Section 275(c)1 controls this case. The Tax Court sustained the assessment as timely under Section 275(c) and the taxpayer has filed this petition for review.
The taxpayer is a manufacturing corporation. The present deficiency assessment grows out of the Commissioner's late discovery of legal impropriety and substantial resultant error in taxpayer's computation of its gross income in its 1944 return. In this computation, as it appeared on the face of the return, the taxpayer first set out a correct statement of its gross sales. From that figure it then subtracted an amount designated as "the cost of goods sold". This "cost" was itself an aggregate of items including a reserve for retroactive wage increases pursuant to demands then pending before the National War Labor Board, but later disallowed. It is not disputed now that this contingent reserve could not lawfully be included in the cost of goods sold. On the face of its return the taxpayer subtracted this inflated cost item from correctly stated gross sales and accordingly arrived at an incorrect gross profit from sales. The error was carried forward when this stated profit was added to other income to arrive at a "total income" figure. The end result was an understatement of this total by more than 25%. This understatement is the basis of the deficiency assessment made more than three years later in reliance upon the language of Section 275(c) which permits assessments within a five-year period in situations where a taxpayer "omits from gross income an amount properly includible therein which is in excess of 25 per centum of the amount of gross income stated in the return".
The Commissioner and the Tax Court say that the language "omits from gross income any amount properly includible therein" should be construed broadly as if it read "understates the final figure in his gross income computation". The taxpayer says the words of the statute are to be taken as if they read "omits from his computation of gross income an item or items of taxable gain". We must decide which is the correct construction of the statute.
To begin with, it is to be noted that in the scheme and administration of the income tax law the determination of gross income from business is a process of computation. Indeed Treasury Regulation 111, Section 29.22(a)-5 states that "In the case of a manufacturing, merchandising, or mining business, `gross income' means the total sales, less the cost of goods sold, plus any income from investments and from incidental or outside operations or sources * * *." And see the numerous provisions of Section 22 of the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. § 22, controlling the computation of gross income generally. In addition, no single item labeled "gross income" appears in the form of return prescribed for the use of the ordinary business corporation. Rather an entire section of the return is headed "Gross Income", though unquestionably the final entry in the required computation, designated "total income", is the gross income item carried forward into subsequent sections of the return for the computation of net income. This is the setting in which the language of Section 275(c) must be construed.
If no special significance is attributed to the verb "omits" as it appears in Section 275(c) and principal emphasis is placed upon the final item of the gross income computation as the gross income figure it is easy to arrive at the government's construction that any error which causes this final figure to be smaller than it should be constitutes an omission of an amount from gross income. On the other hand, if stress is laid upon the connotation of omission as a leaving out and at the same time the character of gross income as a computation is emphasized, it can as well be said that a taxpayer omits an amount from gross income within the meaning of Section 275(c) only when he leaves some item of gain out of his computation of gross income.
We think this spelling out of divergent lines of construction suffices to show that neither requires distortion of the normal meaning of words. Reasonable draftsmen might have viewed the language actually used in Section 275(c) as appropriate to express either the meaning for which the government now contends or that urged by the taxpayer. That is to say there is a real ambiguity in the statute. Accordingly, resort to legislative history is appropriate as an aid to choice between alternative constructions. And once the appropriateness of resort to legislative history is established, we think the history of Section 275(c) persuasively indicates that Congress was addressing itself particularly to the situation where a taxpayer shall fail to include some receipt or accrual in his computation of gross income and not in a more general way to errors of whatever kind in that computation.
Our starting point is the Report of a House Ways and Means Subcommittee in which this exception to the normal three year limitation period originated. Defining the coverage of its proposal the Subcommittee said:
House Hearings before Committee on Way and Means, 73d Cong., 2d Sess., p. 139.
This was confirmed later before the full Committee when Congressman Jere Cooper explained the thinking of the Subcommittee in this way:
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