Court Opinion

ID: 9651563
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:26:52.640025+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:35.862418
License: Public Domain

Bruñe, C. J.,
filed the following dissenting opinion.
I regret to find myself in disagreement with the other members of the Court. I am, however, of the opinion that the sale here in question falls within the exemption provided for a “casual sale” under Code (1957), Art. 81, Sec. 326(e). The sale of personal property here involved was simply a part of a sale of an entire aluminum extrusion plant which the United States Government was disposing of after it had ceased to have further use for it as a war production facility. The Court’s opinion points out that the Retail Sales Tax is imposed upon the act of selling and that the tax is imposed upon the purchaser. I agree; but I do not think that the language of Sec. 325 of Art. 81, upon which this view is based, controls the language of the exception contained in Sec. 326(e) which exempts “[cjasual and isolated sales by a vendor who is not regularly engaged in the business of selling tangible personal property.”
*393There are, of course, two elements to the exemption: (1) the sale must be “casual and isolated;” and (2) the vendor must not be regularly engaged in the business of selling tangible personal property. The Court seems to concede that the second requirement is met when it says that “for present purposes we may assume that its [the Government’s] activities [in selling surplus personal property] could not fairly be described as doing ‘business’, since it was not motivated by a desire for profit.” The Court then proceeds to hold that the sale in question is not casual or isolated, because it is only “one of a long series of operations to be continued into the indefinite future” and supports this by stating that “the disposition of surplus property of every description is a continuous operation by the government agency set up for that very purpose.” Whatever may be the situation as to sales of mittens, blankets, life jackets and innumerable other articles which are left over as surplus property after a war, it seems to me that it is straining reality to regard sales of personal property constituting integral parts of large war production facilities, such as this extrusion plant, as neither casual nor isolated, merely because, as a result of the vastness of this country’s industrial war effort, it has a number of individual industrial plants to sell or because it has a number of such plants and many other things to liquidate. The Court’s opinion seems to blend sales of mittens and of factories into a big, continuous operation; and despite the concession or assumption that the Government is not doing business in making such sales, it nevertheless seems to treat them as all parts of one vast and continuous business operation. Geneva Steel Co. v. State Tax Commission, 209 P. 2d 208 (Utah) seems to me to recognize the unique and hence isolated character of the sale of an entire industrial plant.
I think the order of the Circuit Court should be affirmed.