Court Opinion

ID: 9672023
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 03:47:24.418276+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:13.729117
License: Public Domain

STRINGER, Justice,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I do not believe that Zip Sort is entitled to recover the sales tax paid on the bar code sorter or the two character readers and I therefore dissent from the majority’s holding that Zip' Sort is entitled to a refund of the sales tax paid on the character readers used to print the bar codes.
Whether a transaction constitutes a sale of personal property for sales tax purposes is determined by objectively examining the essence of the arrangement. Questar Data Systems, Inc. v. Commissioner of Revenue, 549 N.W.2d 925, 928 (Minn.1996). The essence here was clearly not the manufacture of tangible property for retail sale, but the providing of a service: the pre-mailing preparation and sorting of mass mailed items.
Taxability turns on the applicability of Minn.Stat. § 297A.15, subd. 5 which provides for a refund of sales tax paid on “capital equipment” — defined as machinery or equipment used “for manufacturing, fabricating, mining, quarrying, or refining tangible personal property * * * to be sold at retail.” Minn.Stat. § 297A.01, subd. 16(a) (Supp. 1993). Unless the use of the two character readers fits within this clear and unambiguous statutory exemption, the sales tax is due on their purchase.
Zip Sort, bearing the burden of proof as to the tax exempt status of the transaction, argued to the tax court that the character readers were acquired for the purpose of fabricating mail “for sale” at retail to the postal service — a dubious notion the tax court quite appropriately rejected with the observation that the mail is not “for sale” to the postal service. On appeal here, citing Fingerhwt Prod. Co. v. Commissioner of Revenue, 258 N.W.2d 606 (Minn.1977), Zip Sort presented a new theory — that it was not the mail that was being fabricated but rather the “scanable bar codes,” and that these, in turn, were being sold at retail to the postal service. While the shifting theories of tax exempt status might themselves suggest that the only fabrication here is Zip Sort’s novel arguments, it is clear that there is no person*42al property sold at retail manufactured or fabi'icated by the character readers.
In Fmgerhut we stated that “[t]he line of demarcation between the use of intangible property and the use of its intangible manifestation is not a clear one” and held that, while typed mailing lists do not constitute tangible personal property because only the information contained on the lists is of value, adhesive address labels were tangible personal property because they represented the information in a useable physical form. 258 N.W.2d at 610. But here the bar codes do not exist independent of the customer’s envelopes on which they are imprinted — they have no separate value whatsoever, for they simply provide a mechanism for transferring the address of the mail recipient to a machine scanable form. The physical properties of the bar codes — the ink printed on the envelopes — “were merely incidental to the services performed,” Id. at 609, — the labeling and bundling of mail for easier processing by the postal service. Thus, the essence of the transaction is starkly before us: the postal service was reducing its postage rate not to acquire some interest in the physical printing of ink on paper, but rather to reflect the labor saving service of having the mail pre-labeled and sorted. This obviously is the rendering of a service, not the sale of personal property.
Finally, even assuming that the bar codes created by the character readers were tangible personal property, I fail to see how there was a “retail sale” conducted here. The postal service gives Zip Sort a value-added refund on mail that has been properly bar coded. If this is a retail sale, to what has the postal service taken title or possession? The answer is clear — nothing. I would affirm the lower courts’ holdings that Zip Sort is not entitled to a refund on the sales tax paid on the purchase of its character readers as well as on the purchase of its bar code sorters.