Court Opinion

ID: 7195551
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-07-24 17:02:18.758799+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:16:19.027637
License: Public Domain

On Application for Rehearing.
Fenner, J.
The taxes concerned in these cases are not taxes on business; they are taxes on property. We are not, therefore, concerned with the nature of the business of these plaintiffs, or where it was conducted.
The assessment conclusively determines the person and the thing taxed.
The following is the assessment-:
Money loaned on interest, all credits and all bills Money in posreceivable for money session, on loaned or advanced, or deposit or in for goods sold. hand.
William M. Bailey, or Western Assurance Co....................... $5,000 $500
Maine Ins. Co. of London............................................................. 12,500
State Investment Ins. Co......................................................... 2,500 ........
Boston Marine Ins. Co..................................................’.......... 3,000 1,500
Niagara Fire Ins. Co............................................................... 1,500 500
St. Paul’s Fire and Marine Ins. Co.......................................... 3,000 1,000
Wm. M. Bailey........................................................................ 1,000 .........
There is no dispute that the persons taxed are the foreign insurance companies which are domiciled out of the State.
It is conclusively proved that no one of them has any “money loaned on interest,” or “money in possession, on deposit or on hand,” or any “bills receivable for money loaned or advanced or for goods sold.”
Of the enumeration on the assessment roll, everything is thus eliminated except the single item of “credits;” and the evidence *770shows that these “credits” consist of nothing but debts due the companies for uncollected premiums.
The simple question presented to us was whether the State possessed jurisdictional power to tax such mere debts due to foreign creditors.
There is no doubt of the legislative power to modify the rule of comity, mobilia personam sequuntur, in many respects. Movables having an actual situs in the State may be taxed there, though the •owner be domiciled elsewhere. Even debts may assume such concrete form in the evidences thereof that they may be similarly subjected when such evidences are situated in the State, as in the case of bank notes, public securities, and. possibly, of negotiable promis-sory notes, bills of exchange or bonds.
But as to mere ordinary debts, reduced to no such concrete forms, they are not capable of acquiring any situs distinct from the domicil of the creditor, and no legislative power exists to change that situs •so far as non-resident creditors are concerned. As said by the Su.preme Court of the United States: “To call debts property of the •debtors is simply to misuse terms. All the property there can be in the nature of things, in debts, belongs to the creditors to whom they •are payable, and follows their domicil wherever that may be. Their •debts can have no locality separate from the parties to whom they ■are due.” State Tax on Foreign-held Bonds, 15 Wall. 300.
A State has no more power to subject such debts’ due to foreign creditors to taxation than it would have to tax their corporeal movables situated at their foreign domicil.
The authorities quoted in the original opinions are ample to support the conclusions reached, which are, besides, thoroughly founded in reason and justice.
Rehearing refused.