focus of this interpretation question is subsection three of section four hundred forty four which lists the taxes charges fees and penalties including with retaliatory acts this is a somewhat complicated tax in the first place the way it operates is somewhat complicated if the court would like me to unpack some of the basic elements to lay the landscape before getting to my argument about the penalties for doing business in some other jurisdiction then that i'm sorry if they only charge is less than their jurisdiction charges for a company with the same up held against constitutional challenge it's the disk you're discouraged the types of taxes against out counters that sometimes jurisdictions are sometimes prone to act and so the idea is if your home state's taxes charges fees or taxes greater than illinois requires in the aggregate for light purposes then the retaliatory acts as a subsection tree is the one that's the focus of this contr says it's beginning language which is critical says the terms penalties these charges and taxes in subsection one of this section shall include and then it proceeds to list illinois privilege taxes which are taxes that insurance companies pay on their premiums their premium income from selling premiums even if they haven't don't have a net profit they have to pay a tax on their net premium income sort of like you know you don't have any you that are used to make the comparison they include income taxes personal property taxes privilege taxes so it's essentially a list of the taxes annelise fees and charges they're included within the scope of the retaliatory attacks now the more you pay in illinois taxes fees and charges the higher your illinois base and that tends to reduce or eliminate any retaliatory attacks in fact illinois charges more for out of state other things i think fire marshal fees for home insurance companies probably one of the other biggest examples the more you pay in illinois taxes fees and charges the higher your only basis and the lower your retaliatory taxes are going to be worth it may be eliminated entirely best the basic structure it's a little complicated but it's not that complicated you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out so the focus of this dispute as does the language in subsection three accounting method for allocating those income tax payments to a particular time period or year if it doesn't do that then i think the party use fairly agree that if it's agnostic on that what are all temporal accounting question then it was within the directors power pursuant to his room making authority to prescribe those details of calculation if it's agnostic or neutral and this temp accounting issue doesn't control the specific details of bed issue the director was free to pass to bring elation did the regulation adopt a cash accounting method for purposes of calculating the illinois basis  retaliatory taxes and the plaintiff companies if they're correct however and this was the position adopted by the circuit court was convinced by their arguments that this subsection three does prescribe a cool accounting it's a pretty straightforward proposition but let me just say for the record so that so the role here if you're a company and most individuals are cash on a cash basis you know you get your paycheck on a given day and when you file your taxes at the end of the year whatever your you if you have an order for widgets in your company and you deliver them in december of one year you are the payment for those widgets and under an accrual accounting method you book that income corresponding to those widgets into sam under a cash companies are free to file that if they don't get the payment till in till january they put it in the following year so that's the difference and the question is whether subsection three of section four hundred forty four purse crimes be a cash method of accounting which is what the directors regulation does adopt and they use the word incurred as opposed to pool i'm not sure of that in the world of accounting there's really any difference but it seems that they use that because perfect tax purposes in a pool counting a method of accounting requires that a refund which is where the monies that are in dispute in this case happen that a refund not be posted back to the original year that the refund relates to but you posted to the year that the refund was accepted a receipt that's not what they did here but let's not get into that sort of you know drill down deep into the weeds clear clarification the the point is that if this statute does not say what they say is it does not prescribe and a cruel type method of accounting for reporting illinois income tax then on this key issue the can point four billion dollars i think that's partly right i don't know i know how much the refund was it was practically eight million dollars for the first name plaintiffs who joined this group after the original one thousand nine hundred nine year in question basis for the privilege tax and lower their they're actually retaliatory attacks so they got the benefit of lowering their retaliatory taxes in their earlier period and now they want to say oh we don't have to declare the refund  because it has to be done according to the year in which the original retaliatory attacks the regional operations referred to and would just go back and be a man i retaliate for a tax you know a return for that year won't say that it nets out you might wind up paying more taxes you might want to paint less taxes if you're guilty of playing tax accounting games hopefully somebody will stop it but there can be a tendency depending upon how your operations and profits go to try and choice they have indicated that this statute controls the accounting method and it has to be either imposed or paid and if imposed and paid are two different terms or collected i guess there are the terms for th cash wasn't intended to address that issue at all it was intended simply to list the types of items that are included in the retaliatory attacks calculation and left the details of these specific counting m we disagree with the currents interpretation of the statute there were three delays wrong they simply failed to disclose eighty percent of the refund and when they got caught failing to disclose it they said oh well wait a minute we interpreted your regulation to mean something different than you want perfect i mean and by the way you're misinterpreting your own statute so these are after the fact arguments inconsistent with their own behavior in this case when they filed their return and if you'll look long and hard at one word in this section and focus on only that word and ignore the rest of it you can come up with an argument that imposed must have some special meaning and it must have a meaning that favors the plaintiffs ask and my answer to that is  the rest of the stash this character doesn't indicate any intention whatsoever to get into the details of temporal accounting methods for calculating italian so it's clear purpose as manifest from the first sentence of this section is merely to legislature's intention to say now we're going to micro manage the directors ministration of this with respect to how you allocate specific items of privilege taxes or certainly could have used much clearer language very easily to convey that intention the trust of this position is that the purpose of this section is  the first words our legislators mouth when they set the terms penalties fees charges and taxes in subsection one of the section shall include that's all they're doing they're saying this is what's included that's the purpose of the section it has nothing to do with the idea of specifying a precise method of tax accounting whether you will or cash accounting methods to determine these things there are other problems with the plane's position as well the normal meaning of the word imposed is simply to make to make apple to make it fine that is perfectly consistent with the purpose of the section as indicated by the first section when you say you know our property taxes imposed on churches the answer is not they're not binding on churches they're exempt because they qualify for religious exemption if the if the languages is  personal you know if it is income tax imposed on corporations in illinois the answer is yes that's a common widely understood and widely used meaning of the term intact stagey i want to add one other thing and i'll bet i'm to a certain extent i'm simply repeating the areas that are in my previous i think are relatively straightforward and conveyor position which is that in the separate section with respect to the privilege tax which is filed on the same return and goes into the those that credits will be term determined on a cash basis the legislature knew how to specify a temporal accounting method when it wanted to do so and it's done so in the very same part of the insurance code out what the other party of privilege taxes creates this crazy hybrid inconsistent system that just doesn't work there are more problems with a plan of position and as i think i've articulated my brief they have zeroed in on a single word in the they have given it one possible meaning but it's not the only possible meaning it's not even the most obvious meaning and they've insisted by focusing on it excessively they pass to support their interpretation of the statute and they're losing the forest for one one on one tree the rest of the statute couldn't be clearer that that was not the intention of the legislature when it provided this list of things that are included in the retaliatory attacks for those reasons i urge the court to firm the records to susan and reverse do business here all of the taxes penalties fees it requires you have warning sure but see the brass going to do business here in illinois and then we're going to hypothesize that in illinois the foreign state will reduce its taxes and that's to can sure your noise sure is will be protected from excessive taxation is a western and southern case in the u s supreme court in the eighty's that's how these taxes which are in forty nine more and if we had simply paid the taxes in the correct amount at the right time we are being penalized for overpaying and so there's no way around the department's argument that we are is it correct we are nine the penalty they were being hit with for simply overpaying in texas two point seven million of additional retaliate for effect that would otherwise have been plus interest it's not how and it can change as circumstances change and as if you need to amend your tax return but the income tax imposed is seven point three percent of your income it's  distinct from how you pay it and how you pay it may be affected by a tax refund which means if i owe a million dollars in tax as a company but i get a five hundred thousand r v from coming to me from a prior y view reinforces the same point it had additionally an unusual language and that's what led to the result that we have in that case that case actually involve a very complex set of carry backs because of excessive profits during the war during world war two so the government sometimes would come in and tell vendors to us we're going to cut what we act we've paid you so you may have had a big profit years there was a complicated provision for how you would credit prior excess profits taxes paid and the language was hicks imposed under a particular four nine of the code of the privileged tax regarding how you can reduce the privilege tax if you pay a certain amount of income tax yes true when the legislature wanted a peculiar type of accounting and their territory taxes when they got a refund their adjusted the earlier years income taxes they just didn't and they paid the additional retaliatory tax to the department here is trying to confiscate more of a refund by treating that as a negative income tax paid whole world when it when it is a secondary position in the event the court does not find the regulation in conflict with the statute but there it does in fact if you would take the regulation at face value and put aside  interpreted that regulation if taken there qualifier out so it's meaningless and we say when you go back to the state to reconstruction principles of work which is every word of a statute should be given meaning different words mindlessly using words without meaning because it doesn't really play out if you can if you pick your argument through its conclusion to look at work to reach jose i think it's important here for the court to kind of keep its eye on the ball and the big picture here which is that the statute as a whole fairly read it properly conforms to the department's interpretation of the suggestion that there's been some type of unfairness here that they've been retaliated against in some discriminatory way i think is doesn't erase files that apartment fall it's regulation has consistently interpreted the stage to mean what is regulation they say that in this given year that it's unfair to them they don't dispute that sometimes you can work out the other way your kids go to your of adonis they wind up with a five thousand dollars bill for braces but you spread the payments over two years and you discover later that you don't need the seven percent threshold for getting a deduction against your income taxes for medical expenses and you want to do it on a cool basis because that's more fair to you but that's not what the law says the law has to be to applied even basis according to the language of the statute the language and stage appear his is perfectly consistent with the notion that all the legislature intended to do here was to create a list of things that included within the retaliatory attacks we don't dispute that the word imposed sometimes can mean what the plaintiffs say which is you know the true liability i think is the language they use they want to stay away from the word cool because they're awesome problems but they don't dispute th items that are going to be included income taxes imposed in illinois privilege taxes have income taxes imposed in other jurisdictions there's no true amount this determined there there's nobody actually paying taxes those are hypothetical so the very same wording in the very same section has the opposite meaning that they insist it has in this section for their purposes they say that this is not a dispute about whether the stair should respond of some type of temporal accounting method or given reporting there there's only there's no two ways about it either they're insisting that it requires to be done in a certain reporting period or they say that the station is neutral in which case we win our position is that the department has adopted a cash method for a lot of reasons because the legislature knows how to prescribe a temple when it wants to do so the word imposed is perfectly consistent with the broader meaning of the statute which is just a numeration of the items that are and are not included in the if it strains the meaning to focus on it exclusively given this is obscure interpretation it's not obvious from the meaning of the language an attribute to it all the significance that doesn't make any sense when you think that some corporations are not on a calendar year basis some of them get extensions to file a return so there's no way that they can know but they know what their tax payments are that's easy enough but there's no way for them to know ahead of time what they're going to report by march fifteenth when the retaliatory attacks are do with em any possible extension and their theory is that under this true amount to do it the retaliatory tax returns are forever open depending upon the later amendments of their only income tax your corresponds to that element of your own way tax basis for income taxes and we don't have to then get into this situation where if they overpaid and increase their bases in one year then they have to go back