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:
CRANSON v. UNITED STATES.
No. 10644.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.
Jan. 24, 1945.
Kehearing Denied Feb. 26, 1945.
Leon .DeFremery and Morrison, Hohfeld, Foerster, Shuman & Clark, all of San Francisco, Cal., for appellant.
Samuel O. Clark, Jr., Asst. U. S. Atty. Gen., and Sewall Key, Helen R. Carloss, Courtnay C. Hamilton, and Helen Good-ner, Sp. Assts. to Atty. Gen., and Frank J. Hennessy, U. S. Atty., and Esther B. Phillips, Asst. U. S. Atty., both of San Francisco, Cal., for appellee.
Before GARRECHT, DENMAN, and HEALY, Circuit Judges.
GARRECHT, Circuit Judge.
The question here is whether the distribution of $450 to the taxpayer from the Honolulu Oil Corporation, Ltd., hereinafter referred to as Honolulu constituted a taxable dividend. The taxpayer is suing to recover income taxes paid on this distribution in 1936.
The facts are stipulated and were adopted by the court below as its findings of facts.
On August 31, 1936, Honolulu liquidated three wholly owned subsidiaries and took over their assets subject to their liabilities, in complete cancellation and redemption of all their issued and outstanding capital stock. When Honolulu took over these subsidiaries, they had- an aggregate operating deficit of $1,205,451.61.
In 1936, Honolulu paid cash distributions of $1 for each share of its capital stock. Honolulu’s earnings during 1936 amounted to $931,553.82 before deducting any portion of the above loss.
The appellant urges that the lower court erred in its judgment and contends that if the earnings are reduced by the operating deficits taken over from the liquidation of the subsidiaries, the distribution of $450 to the taxpayer was one of capital and not income. To support his position the taxpayer is relying on the doctrine of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Sansome, 2 Cir., 60 F.2d 931, 933, which has been consistently followed. There are no cases to the contrary. The principle established therein is that a tax free exchange, pursuant to reorganization, does not break “the continuity of the corporate life", and that where the reorganization “does not toll the company’s life as a continued venture” the earnings and profits of the transferor corporation are transferred intact over to the transferee corporation and shall be considered earnings of the transferee for tax purposes. The Sansome rule did not deal with the liquidation of a, subsidiary as in the instant case, but Article 115-11 of Regulations 94 recognized that the same rule would apply to a tax free liquidation of a subsidiary, but did not extend the rule to embrace operating deficits.
This is an open question. If Honolulu itself had at the beginning of 1936 the same operating deficit, the deficit, could not have been deducted. Long Beach Improvement Co. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 5 B.T.A. 590; Foley Securities Corporation v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 38 B.T.A. 1036. An operating deficit is a bookkeeping convenience, which enables an individual to determine at a glance the present financial position of his business- — he can readily see at what point his earning’s have or will wipe out his losses. The equation of operating deficit for tax purposes is the loss sustained within the taxable year. As to the alternative contention of the appellant here that if the operating deficits do not diminish the earnings, the losses sustained in the liquidation would diminish earnings, there has been no showing that any of the loss was incurred in the tax year in question. Furthermore, it is apparent that appellant has not maintained its burden of proof that any of the deficits occurred in the tax year 1936. The burden of proving error in the Commissioner’s rulings in such cases is on the taxpayer. It is hence not before us to consider whether any such deficits would be deductible from the profits of the parent corporation if they had occurred in the tax year 1936.
Whether or not the parent company suffered losses in tax years prior to 1936, if there be corporate earnings or profit in that year the Revenue Act of 1936 provides 1hat distributions to the stockholders in that year are deemed to be from its most r ecently accumulated earnings or profits lor that year, without regard to the fact (hat they are earned in that portion of the year after the distribution was made. Those provisions are:
“Section, 115. Distributions by corporations
“(a) Definition of dividend. The term ‘dividend’ when used in this title (except in section 203(a) (3) and section 207 (c) (1), relating to insurance companies) means any distribution made by a corporation to its shareholders, whether in money or in other property, (1) out of its earnings or profits accumulated after February 28, 1913, or (2) out of earnings or profits of the taxable year (computed as of the close of the taxable year without diminution by reason of any distributions made during the taxable year), without regard to the amount of earnings and profits at the time the distribution was made.
“(b) Source of distributions. For the purposes of this Act every distribution is made out of earnings or profits to the extent thereof, and from the most recently accumulated earnings or profits. * * * ” 26 U.S.C.A. Int.Rev.Code, § 115(a, b).
It being admitted that $931,553.82 earnings or profits were made in 1936 by the parent corporation and besides it had on hand undistributed profits of $139,631.26, the total amount exceeding that distributed to the stockholders, they were held properly by the tax court to be taxable as dividends to the distributees, of which the appellant is one. The order of the lower court is affirmed.
Allen v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. 4 Cir., 107 F.2d 151; Pearce v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 315 U.S. 543, 62 S.Ct. 754, 86 L.Ed. 1016.

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: 1