Court Opinion

ID: 9868529
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-26 18:39:44.843306+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:45:51.336063
License: Public Domain

ON Petition to Reheab.
The defendant, a life insurance company, qualified to do business in Tennessee in 1926, and withdrew from the State in 1931, leaving unmatured policies on which premiums were sent by the persons insured to the company’s home office in Chicago. For reasons stated in *7the opinion filed, the defendant was field liable for the tax measured by premium receipts from the unmatured policies. We have before us a petition by defendant for a rehearing.
It is said by petitioner that the opinion holding defendant liable for the tax is not based on Code, sections 6120' and 6122, but is based altogether upon Section 6118. Upon that premise the petitioner proceeds to consider whether Section 6118 levies a tax upon unpaid premiums after the company’s withdrawal from the State. We quoted Sections 6118’, 6120 and 6122, and said [supra, p. 5; 137 S. W. (2d), 277, 278] :
“We construe these provisions of the statute to mean that the tax is levied upon the right to do business in the state, measured by a percentage of annual premiums to the exclusion of all other taxes, the tax on the annual premiums to be paid throughout ’the life of policies issued. . . . Though measured by two and a half per cent of premiums received on policies issued by the company while exercising its license from the state, the tax was levied upon the privilege of entering the state and engaging in the insurance business, and not upon the annual premiums. The distinction between the tax and the measure of the tax should not be confused, and when the distinction is kept in mind the purpose of the legislature seems clear. . . . The defendant insurance company by its compliance with the statute adopted and agreed to the construction we have given it, and cannot now repudiate its provisions.” .
Our construction of the statute is not contrary to the opinion in the ease of State v. Connecticut Mut. Life Insurance Co., 106 Tenn., 282, 335, 61 S. W., 75, 78. The facts of that case are not identical with the facts of this case. The effort there was to enforce a tax on *8premiums after the company’s withdrawal from the State in 1894. In response to the State’s petition for rehearing, in which it was insisted that notwithstanding withdrawal of the company in 1894 it should be held liable for the tax under the Acts of 1897 and 1899', the Court said:
“We have no doubt but that a foreign company which enters the state after the passage of such an act, or which, being in the state prior to its passage, remains in the state, and doing business in it, after the acts take effect, are subject to the provisions of the acts, even if they afterwards withdraw; but these acts do not apply in the present case, because the defendant company withdrew from the state in 1894, and was not doing business in the state when the acts took effect in 1897 and 18991. Nor was it made a condition upon which the company originally entered the state that it should continue to pay, after its withdrawal, upon business then in force.
“This decision does not in any way question the right of the legislature to impose such tax requirements upon foreign corporations as it may see proper as a condition for their entering the state, nor such as may be legitimate for their continuing to do business in the state, but it only applies to companies which withdraw from the state at a time when there is no act in force taxing them for receiving premiums beyond the state, and which have not expressly or impliedly consented to such taxes. ’ ’
In conformity with the foregoing judicial declaration, the Legislature enacted Chapter 442, Acts of 1908, providing for payment of the tax levied by Code, section 6118, upon premium receipts for the life of policies issued while the company was licensed to do business in the State. It is not necessary to reiterate statements made in the original opinion. The Act of 1900, which was *9carried into Code, sections 6120 and 6122, supplemented' Code, section 6118, wlricli was derived from Chapter 160, section 19, Acts of 1895 and antecedent acts. The Act of 1903 was apparently passed to meet the decision of the Court denying the State’s right to recover premiums under statutes passed subsequent to the insurance company’s withdrawal from the State. We construed Code, sections 6118, 61201, and 6122 together and in accord with the judicial declaration which induced the enactment of Chapter 442, Acts of 1903.
We find no merit in the petition for rehearing.
Denied.