Court Opinion

ID: 9469802
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:49:32.361255+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:34.778883
License: Public Domain

FAY, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
Taxpayers have given away no property, no interests and no rights but surely they have made a gift. Judge Hill has labored hard to find some “legal support” for this conclusion. When one lets another use large sums of money for no charge, who would doubt that there has been conferred a valuable gift? The fact that the receipt given for the money is a demand note makes no difference.
Some would label the result in the Tax Court “poetic justice.” The Commissioner is struggling against the web that government lawyers have been weaving for years. Tax laws are different; literal application is required — common sense is irrelevant and inappropriate. Only on this occasion, the “harsh result” denies the government revenue quite justly due.
Feeling that courts should avoid “slavish” interpretation of the Code and that the taxpayers in this instance are the ones relying on a “crabbed reading” of the words used by Congress1, I join with Judge Hill. Any other result makes no sense.

. See Rickey v. U. S., 592 F.2d 1251, 1258 (5th Cir. 1979).