History
The Tax Court had previously addressed this issue in Hornung v. Commissioner. Paul Hornung, a football player for the Green Bay Packers, won a Corvette as a prize on December 31, 1961, for his performance in the 1961 NFL Championship Game. The game was played in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the car was kept at a dealership in New York City, and Hornung did not retrieve the car until January 3, 1962. The court decided that Hornung had not constructively received the car (income) in 1961 because, under the circumstances, it would have been unreasonable to expect him to retrieve the car on the day he won it.
The Tax Court also addressed constructive receipt in two cases, both entitled Veit v. Commissioner. In Veit I, as part of redoing his employment contract, the taxpayer agreed to defer receiving a bonus that he was owed until the next year. The Tax Court upheld the agreement over the IRS's protest because it was the result of an arm's length business transaction, not a sham to evade paying taxes for a year. Indeed, the deferral was requested by the taxpayer's employer. In Veit II, the Tax Court upheld a subsequent agreement by which the taxpayer would receive five equal payments over the course of five years, rather than the one lump-sum payment previously agreed-upon. Again, the IRS objected to the deferral, and again, the Tax Court found for the taxpayer. The deferral was requested by the employer, and the full amount of the bonus was never "unqualifiedly subject to demand or withdrawal."
Read more about this topic: Constructive Receipt
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)