Court Opinion

ID: 9427193
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:59.885414+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:05.375477
License: Public Domain

Me. Justice Rehnquist,
concurring.
I join the Court’s opinion and write separately only to emphasize that part of it which I think is critical to the disposition of this case. Both petitioner and the Government have available to them arguments, based upon two different clauses of § 6672, which, if accepted, would enable them to prevail on the literal language of the clause alone without further consideration of other factors. Petitioner argues with considerable cogency that the portion of § 6672 phrased con-junctively, ante, at 245, fails to include him within the class of persons liable for the penalty imposed by that section. If his argument were to be accepted, that would be the end of the case. I agree with the Court that his argument should be rejected, because its appeal based on the literal language of the clause is more than outweighed by the fact that the clause was added in 1954 very probably to narrow the class of *261persons who might be subject to the predecessor penalty-provisions which were phrased in the disjunctive.
Having won this point the Government could then rely on the disjunctive literal language of the statute and its predecessors and argue that petitioner, a responsible corporate official at some point in time, is liable for all taxes which he failed to collect or, as is the case here, pay over. But the Government does not advance this argument, realizing, no doubt, that it is foreclosed largely for the reasons given by the Court in Part III-B (2) of its opinion. I fully agree with the Court’s conclusion in this respect, stressing in addition only the fact that both the language and history of § 6672 make it perfectly clear that liability for this penalty cannot be imposed in the absence of a willful failure and the word “willful,” used as it is in this context in conjunction with the word “penalty,” requires some action that tends to impede collection of the corporation’s trust-fund taxes before liability can attach. For example, even the Government concedes that a responsible officer need not use personal funds or liquidate corporate assets to satisfy past tax obligations which have arisen under the withholding provisions before the official assumed responsibility. Ante, at 254. It should be apparent from the Court’s opinion, however, that this notion of “fault” may have little to do with other sections of the Tax Code. Its importation into § 6672 is compelled by the normal canons of statutory construction, but those canons may speak differently as to the meaning of the word “willful” or the concept of “fault” in other sections of the Code. Indeed, the interpretation of § 6672 we adopt today is limited by the very factors which caused us to adopt it.