Court Opinion

ID: 9468516
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:16:43.666621+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:54.207683
License: Public Domain

MURNAGHAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur, for the opinion abides by the current state of the law. Moreover, the taxpayer made no contention that his wife’s legitimate employment concerns should play a role in determining where his tax home should be fixed. Perhaps it is a matter so fraught with unexpected possibilities for distortions and for the taking of unanticipated undue advantages by imaginative taxpayers that it should be dealt with comprehensively by Congress, not on a case-by-case basis by the courts.
Nevertheless, the working wife, whose status is acknowledged at least to be equal in dignity to that of the husband, is a much too belated phenomenon. Spouses frequently file tax returns jointly. Daly and his wife did so here. Especially in such eases, but even in appropriate situations involving spouses filing separately, the taxpayers should be able to approach tax issues such as the one posed here on a partnership or joint venture basis. As a consequence, there should be rules detailing appropriate circumstances in which the one spouse’s situation should play a significant role in ascertaining the situs of the other spouse’s tax home.
Here, husband and wife were each working in the Washington area at the time their residence was established there. The wife’s employment position may well have prospered, and, for business reasons, she is as justified in staying in the Washington area as the husband would be in moving to Philadelphia to be closer to the customers of his new employer whom he now serves.
It is questionable in the extreme whether Congress ever intended to put additional strains on marriage such as the rule is likely to do which we, by precedent, are here compelled to apply. What was at least defensible where employment circumstanc*256es changed as they did for Daly, and the taxpayer’s wife was staying at home and making a home rather than working outside the home, is virtually unjustifiable in the case of Daly’s wife who regularly earns income from employment outside the home.
I express a hope that Congress will give early attention to the problem and afford equity to people caught in the situation of Mr. and Mrs. Daly. See, K. Dobbs, Comment — Daly v. Commissioner: Effect of the Tax Home Rule under Section 162 on Two-Earner Families, 34 Tax Lawyer 829 (1981).