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52 T.C. 170

Mitchell v. Commissioner

United States Tax Court

Decided April 30, 1969

United States Tax Court · decided 1969-04-30

Respondent has determined that on a stock sale-purchase transaction, within the meaning of sec. 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, payment by petitioner to his employer of the difference… Held: Arrowsmith principles not applicable. Held, further, petitioner's payment constituted deductible ordinary and necessary business expense.

Relies on Arrowsmith v. Commissioner

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decision will be entered for the petitioners · Decided 1969-04-30

How this case has been cited

Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently January 1996 · most notably Mitchell v. Commissioner (1970), Anderson v. Commissioner (1973)

11 federal appellate ·

2201969197019801990decided

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 →

Drennen, J.,

¶1concurring: I cannot agree with the majority opinion that because the payment “grew directly and solely from the ‘sale-purchase’ occurrence” it has only securities law significance and no tax law significance. I would not dismiss Arrowsmith v. Commissioner, 344 U.S. 6, so readily. Had there been no other overriding business reason for the payment, I think the rationale of Arrowsmith might require treatment of the payment as a capital loss, if it is deductible at all. However, the majority opinion has made an ultimate finding of fact that the payment was made to avoid injury to petitioner’s business reputation and disadvantage to his career with General Motors, which I accept as a factual determination by the trial judge. If this was the ultimate reason for the payment I doubt that Arrowsmith would require treatment of the payment as a capital loss, rather than a business expense, even though the payment may have had its genesis in the “sale-purchase occurrence.”

¶2It occurs to me that this payment might in reality be considered an additional cost of the new stock petitioner purchased under the stock option and should be treated as a capital investment rather than as either a deductible loss or expense, but it is my understanding that this argument was not made to the Court.

Tietjens, agrees with this concurring opinion.
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