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27 T.C. 464

Marks v. Commissioner

United States Tax Court

Decided December 10, 1956

United States Tax Court · decided 1956-12-10

Petitioner's firm, in the normal course of business, dealt in shares of stock of a corporation in which petitioner was a shareholder and director. Held: the payment to the corporation of the insider's profits is, in the circumstances of this case, deductible pursuant to section 23 (a) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939.

Relies on Davis v. Commissioner · Lehman v. Commissioner

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decision will be entered for the petitioner · Decided 1956-12-10

How this case has been cited

Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently December 2019 · most notably Walet v. Commissioner (1958), Anderson v. Commissioner (1973)

5 federal appellate · 2 state decisions

1401956196019701980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

View the full empirical analysis of this case →

Muedogk, J.,

¶1concurring: $17,672.08, representing gains from sales of the Shamrock stock, was reported by the petitioner- as ordinary income in a prior year while in the taxable year this same amount, a part of the “amount realized” in those sales, was surrendered by the petitioner. Thus in the end the petitioner had no gain from the sales and yet reported a profit in a prior year. If he had surrendered the profit in the same year in which the sales had been made, obviously he would have had no income to report from those transactions. Here the sales occurred in one year, the profit was returned in a later year, and a deduction must be allowed in the later year to bring the petitioner’s income into balance, just as a recovery on a debt must be reported as income merely because it was previously allowed as a deduction. The one is really not a loss and the other is really not income, but in each case the adjustment should be made in the later year.

¶2No public policy is involved. This is not a case where the allowance of the deduction would weaken an effective method of enforcing a sharply defined public policy by mitigating the deterrent effect of sanctions imposed by section 16 (b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 through a tax advantage, as would be the case of allowing a deduction for an ordinary fine or penalty. The petitioner merely restored the profits realized by him which he had previously reported as ordinary income. The' effect of allowing the deduction would be merely to offset the income already taxed. The disallowance on the other hand would in substance provide an added sanction — a consequence that is plainly outside the purpose of the revenue laws. Cf. dissents in William F. Davis, Jr., 17 T. C. 549, 559, et seq.

¶3The result reached in this case seems contrary to what was said and done in Robert Lehman, 25 T. C. 629, and William F. Davis, supra.

Mulroney, J., agrees with this concurring opinion.
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