payment
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 323 U.S. 658 - Rosenman v. United States · 1945Most cited · 704 citing opinions
tax suspense deposit
Money in these accounts is held not as taxes duly collected are held but as a deposit made in the nature of a cash bond for the payment of taxes thereafter found to be due.
How the Supreme Court has restated “payment”
Each Supreme Court definition of “payment,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “payment”
Court decisions citing the 6 opinions that defined “payment” — 1,652 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 6 definitions, chronological · 1852–1961
- ORIGINAL
A note of the debtor himself, or of a third party, is never considered as a payment of a precedent debt, unless there be a special agreement to that effect.
a promise is not payment unless it would naturally be so regarded in the common speech of men, and that the extent of the payment, whether partial or complete, must be subject to a kindred test.
As the return was on the cash basis, there could be no deduction in the year 1932, unless the substitution of respondent's note in that year constituted a payment in cash or its equivalent. There was no cash payment and under the doctrine of the Eckert case the giving of the taxpayer's own note was not the equivalent of cash to entitle the taxpayer to the deduction.
cash-basis taxpayer
payment' connotes tender by the debtor with the intention to satisfy the debt coupled with its acceptance as satisfaction by the creditor.
Payment' is not a talismanic word. It may have many meanings depending on the sense and context in which it is used. A payment may constitute a capital expenditure, an exchange of assets, a prepaid expense, a deposit, or a current expense, and when the exact nature of the payment is not immediately ascertainable because it depends on some future event, such as the outcome of litigation, its treatment for income tax purposes must await that event.
tax accrual