Court Opinion

ID: 4493316
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2020-01-17 22:03:53.300623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:03:59.595912
License: Public Domain

GoodRTch,
dissenting: I disagree with the majority opinion in lajdng as a test for successful tax avoidance the adherence by the taxpayer to the so-called normal procedure in the conduct of his affairs. In the first place, from the number of controversies involving avoidance attempts, it might well be argued that the normal procedure of most taxpayers in the conduct of their affairs includes any acts necessary to carry out a determination to pay taxes in such amounts as the law demands, and no more — a fact of which the majority opinion takes no cognizance.
Next, I do not understand that a taxpayer must sit by idly twirling his thumbs until a tax liability alights upon him. If he is warned of its approach, if he sees it coming, he may seek such shelter as the law offers in an effort to escape it or diminish its blow. Of course, by examination, it must be determined whether the shelter he reaches is really constructed of statutory material, and by close scrutiny of the facts it must be determined whether the taxpayer really got himself and- his transactions within it. But he should not be counted out merely because the shelter lies off his beaten path and he scurries for it.
*1347The suggestion of the majority that every taxpayer must needs plod along the path laid by the past requirements of his business, meeting and paying any and all tax liabilities encountered, is highly Utopian — at least from the governmental viewpoint — and offers an ethical canon, interesting but quite beyond the necessities of decision in the instant controversy. Apparently it does not recognize that high taxes, like high water, may make an old path unusable, nor that on occasion a new path may be charted during the survey preliminary to entering upon a transaction in order to reckon with the tax demands certain to come. To say that the old path must be blindly followed, that bypaths or new paths may not be laid out by proper strides within legal bounds, goes too far.