What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
Snyder HOWELL, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. UNITED STATES of America, Defendant-Appellee.
No. 85-1078.
United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.
Argued Oct. 21, 1985.
Decided Oct. 31, 1985.
Rehearing Denied Nov. 26, 1985.
Thomas J. Wolf, Jr., P.C., Harrisburg, 111., for plaintiff-appellant.
John A. Dudeck, Jr., Asst. Atty. Gen., Tax Div., Dept, of Justice, Washington, D.C., for defendant-appellee.
Before POSNER, FLAUM and EASTER-BROOK, Circuit Judges.
EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge.
An employer that establishes a pension plan for its employees sometimes contributes funds to the plan on top of the employees’ stated salaries. These are “employers’ contributions” and are not taxable income for the employee until the plan pays benefits to the employee. 26 U.S.C. §§ 401(a), 4Q3, 501(a). The employer alternatively may give the employees higher stated salaries but dedicate some of the salaries to the pension plan. These deductions are “employees’ contributions” and are taxable income to the employee, but corresponding amounts of pension disbursements will not be taxed. 26 U.S.C. §§ 72, 402.
The distinction between “employers’ contributions” and “employees’ contributions” to qualified pension plans is almost wholly nominal. It is a matter of indifference to an employer whether it pays $30,000 salary to the employee plus $3,000 to a pension plan on the employee’s behalf, or instead $33,000 to the employee, of which it sends $3,000 to a pension plan. In either event the employee receives $30,000 at once and $3,000 in deferred compensation, and the employer may deduct the whole $33,000 as an ordinary and necessary business expense. 26 U.S.C. § 404. But the tax consequences of the distinction are substantial. The tax on employers’ contributions is deferred until retirement, and the discounted present value of the deferred tax is less than the value of tax paid today.
The distinction between employers’ and employees’ contributions is one example of the dominance of form over substance in the tax code. Perhaps aware that there was no substance—but substantial consequences for the revenue — in this distinction, Congress allowed governmental bodies (but not private employers) to select still a third label. A section added in 1974, 26 U.S.C. § 414(h)(2), provides that if a state or local government’s contributions “are designated as employee contributions but [the] employing unit picks up the contributions, the contributions so picked up shall be treated as employer contributions.”
This statute might be read to require a state to “pick up” the contributions by assuming them, topping up the total compensation so that the employee then receives his full stated salary without a deduction for pensions. There is some support for such a view in the conference report, which describes a “pick up” plan as one “where the contribution is paid by the government, with no withholding from the employee’s salary ...” H.R.Conf.Rep. 93-1280, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 279 (1974), U.S. Code Cong. & Admin.News 1974, pp. 4639, 5038, 5060. But a requirement that there be “no withholding” from the salary would be the same thing as. traditional “employers’ contributions.” The Internal Revenue Service therefore has treated § 414(h)(2) as an extension of the nominalism from which it grew. See Rev.Rul. 81-35, 1981-1 Cum. Bull. 255; Rev.Rul. 81-36, 1981-1 Cum. Bull. 256; Rev.Rul. 77-462, 1977-2 Cum. Bull. 358.
Under the Commissioner’s interpretation § 414(h)(2) permits a government to treat contributions as “employees’ contributions” for its own purposes but “employers’ contributions” for purposes of federal income taxation. The government establishes two “salaries.” One, for state purposes, is the base from which contributions are withheld; the other, for federal purposes, is a lower salary from which nothing is withheld; the difference between the salary for state purposes and the salary for federal purposes is the “picked up” contribution. In order to use this option, a government announces that the employees’ contributions have been “picked up” and reduces their salaries — or more accurately the amounts shown as wages on their W-2 forms. So long as the employer forecloses the employees’ “option of choosing to receive the contributed amounts directly instead of having them paid by the employer to the pension plan” (Rev.Rul. 81-35, 1981 Cum.Bull. 255), it meets the requirements of § 414(h)(2).
In 1980 Illinois enacted a statute providing that after January 1, 1981, each governmental unit “may pick up the employee contributions required” by the state’s pension laws. Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 108½ § 18-133.1. The Commissioner then issued a private letter ruling that contributions “picked up” by the state after December 31, 1981, and paid to the retirement system would not be includable in the employees’ gross income. See CCH Private Letter Rulings, Ltr. 8209038 (Dec. 4, 1981).
Snyder Howell, a circuit judge in Williamson County, Illinois, is covered by the Judges’ Retirement System of Illinois. Some of each circuit judge’s salary is withheld and turned over to the system; the exact amount withheld depends on whether the judge is contributing to a fund for spouses’ benefits. Judge Howell’s contribution was 11% of his salary. For purposes of state law, the contributions are employees’ contributions. (The parties have not told us why, but the salaries of Illinois judges are protected against diminution during their terms in office, and the adoption of employees’ contributions may have been a method of establishing a pension plan without a nominal reduction in the judges’ salary or an increase in the net payments made by the state.) Beginning in 1982, the Comptroller of Illinois issued Howell and other judges W-2 forms showing a lower taxable salary; the Comptroller reduced Howell’s stated salary by the 11% contribution made to the Retirement System. The state did not make any other change in Howell’s compensation. Only the taxable wage reported to the IRS changed. As a result, the state withheld less tax from Howell’s check.
Judge Howell then filed amended tax returns for 1978-80. He claimed a refund for taxes paid on the sums that had been withheld from his pay and turned over to the Retirement System. These sums, he maintained, had been “picked up” by the state fully as much as the sums turned over to the Retirement System starting in 1982. There was no substantive difference and therefore, he maintained, there should be no tax difference. The IRS denied the request, and Howell filed this suit. The suit is financed by the Illinois Judges Association, whose members have an interest in common with Judge Howell.
The district court concluded that the pension contributions before 1982 were “employees’ contributions” within the meaning of federal law. State law designated them this way, and under federal law the employer’s designation controls. The proviso allowing employers to “pick up” employees’ contributions gives them a way to reverse the effect of their own designation, but they must avail themselves of the privilege. Illinois did not do so until 1982, so Howell lost. We agree with both the result and the reasoning.
The starting point for income taxation is that all sums paid to, or on behalf of, an employee are taxable income. 26 U.S.C. § 61. If Illinois were to send money directly to Judge Howell’s cousin on his behalf, the money would be Howell’s income even though he never saw it; if the state put gold coins in a safe deposit box for safekeeping until his retirement, this also would be Howell’s income. That the employee never gets the use of the money, or that the use is deferred, does not override the general principle that the full compensation for services rendered — no matter to whom paid, or when — is income immediately taxable to the person who earned the money. See United States v. Basye, 410 U.S. 441, 93 S.Ct. 1080, 35 L.Ed.2d 412 (1973) (payments to a pension plan are taxable when they vest even though not for the account of a particular person); Lucas v. Earl, 281 U.S. 111, 50 S.Ct. 214, 74 L.Ed. 731 (1930) (anticipatory assignments of income do hot reduce taxable income). Money paid to a retirement plan is money earned; that the employee has no control of the amount or the purpose to which it is devoted is an irrelevant detail. E.g., Hogan v. United States, 513 F.2d 170 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 423 U.S. 836, 96 S.Ct. 62, 46 L.Ed.2d 55 (1975) (amounts involuntarily paid to the federal civil service retirement plan are taxable income); Zwiener v. CIR, 743 F.2d 273 (5th Cir.1984) (same for a state plan).
It would not have mattered in Lucas v. Earl, which held that the employee must pay tax on 100% of his salary even though he had irrevocably assigned 50% of it to someone else, if the employer had “reduced” the salary by 50% and “contributed” an identical amount to the other party. The matching contribution would still be compensation for services rendered, and therefore income. So, too, is any contribution to a pension plan. It therefore does not matter whether a contribution on an employee’s behalf is designated as an “employer’s contribution” — not unless Congress causes it to matter. Congress did. By allowing an employer to designate a contribution as an “employer’s contribution” and defer taxation of that income until retirement, Congress both created an opportunity and left its exercise to the employer. As an economic matter, employers’ contributions and employees’ contributions are identical; they differ in name only. Under the tax law the name matters, and the employer picks the name.
Section 414(h)(2) gives governmental employers a second name to use, in order to achieve the same result. Its function is evidently to avoid hurdles of state law that might prevent governments from designating pension contributions as “employers’ contributions” and so deferring employees’ tax. By “picking up” contributions, governments may both preserve their internal characterization of the contributions and achieve the tax benefits that private employers regularly do when they make “employers’ contributions.”
The employee is stuck with the employer’s designation, no matter what it is. Until 1981 Illinois by statute called the contributions to the Judges’ Retirement System employees’ contributions. This remitted Judge Howell to the presumptive rule that the whole salary is taxable. We could not accept his argument that the state “picked up” his contributions even before 1982 — because he never saw the money either before or after the new law and never has had any choice about its destination — without either reversing one of the most venerable principle of taxation (that he who earns the money pays the full tax) or disregarding the rule that permits the employer to designate a contribution as made by it or by the employee. Illinois made one choice for years before 1982, and now (using the right to “pick up” contributions) it has made another. Judge Howell is bound by both.
This exalts form over substance, no doubt. In tax, however, form and substance often coincide. The election between employers’ and employees’ contributions is nothing but form, and the new designation option in § 414(h)(2) simply continues the practice. A court must apply an empty distinction with the same fidelity as it applies any other. Congress may choose, if it wishes, to allow employers to control the tax consequences of pension contributions, and the selection of one device is neither better nor worse than another. “When we are dealing with statutory terms of art, the form-substance dichotomy is a false one. ‘Substance’ can only be derived from forms created by the statute itself. Here substance is form and little else; there is no natural law of reverse triangular mergers.” Joseph Isenbergh, Musings on Form and Substance in Taxation, 49 U.Chi.L.Rev. 859, 879 (1982).
The designation has consequences. Taxes deferred are taxes reduced. Similarly the change in wages reported on the W-2 form affects the amount of income from which exclusions may be made, and it reduces the adjusted gross income from which deductions may be made. One tax effect breeds another. None of this matters. The outcome of this case follows from the employer’s power to elect designations with tax effects for the employee. Before 1982 the designation in Illinois was that the contributions were made by the employee, and that is that.
Affirmed.
Whether the state must pass a statute, as opposed to using some other process of reducing wages and “picking up" contributions that is adequate for the purpose under state law, we need not decide. We also do not decide whether the Commissioner’s definition of a "pick up" is the only one he could have chosen. The IRS has discretion to interpret ambiguous terms, and the interpretation the Commissioner has placed on § 414(h)(2) is highly favorable to taxpayers. Perhaps he could have been more stingy; we need not say.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "private business and its executives"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 0