Court Opinion

ID: 9421884
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:00:21.066927+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:33.008462
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
whom Mr. Justice Clark and Mr. Justice-Harlan join, dissenting.
• English courts. would decide the case as it is being decided here. They would do so because English courts do not recognize the relevance of legislative explanations of the meaning of a statute made in the course of its enactment. If Parliament desires to put a gloss on the meaning of ordinary language, it must incorporate it in the text of legislation. See Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law (5th ed.), 330-336; Amos, The Interpretation of Statutes,. 5 Camb. L. J. 163; Davies, The Interpretation of Statutes, 35 Col. L. Rev. 519; Lord Haldane in Viscountess Rhondda’s Claim, [ 1922] 2 A. C. 339, 383-384. Quite otherwise has been the process of statutory construction practiced by this Court over the decades in scores and scores of cases. Congress can be the glossator of the words it legislatively uses either by writing its desired meaning, however odd, into the text of its enactment, or by a contemporaneously authoritative explanation accompanying a statute. The most authoritative form of such explanation is a congressional report defining the scope and meaning of proposed legislation. The most authoritative report is a Conference Report acted upon by-both Houses and therefore unequivocally representing the wilLof both Houses as the joint legislative body.
No doubt to find failure to .file' a declaration of estimated income to be a “substantial underestimate” would be to attribute to Congress a most unlikely meaning for that; phrase in § 294 (d) (2) simpliciter. But if Congress chooses by appropriate means for expressing its . *95purpose to use language with an unlikely and even odd meaning, it is not for this Court to frustrate its purpose. The Court’s task is to construe not English but congressional English. Our problem is not what do ordinary English words mean, but what did Congress mean them to mean. “It is~said that when the meaning of language is plain we are not to resort to evidence in order to raise doubts. That is rather an axiom of experience than a rule of law, and does not preclude consideration of persuasive evidence if it exists.” Boston Sand & Gravel Co. v. United States, 278 U. S. 41, 48.
Here we have the most persuasive kind of evidence that Congress did not mean the language in controversy, however plain it may be to the ordinary user of English, to have the ordinary meaning. íhese provisions were first énaeted in the Current Tax Payment Act of 1943, c. 120, 57 Stat. 126, as additions to § 294 (a) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1939. The Conference Report, H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 510, p. 56, and the Senate Report, S. Rep. No. 221, p. 42, both gave the.provision dealing with substantial underestimation, of taxes the following gloss:
“In the event.of a failure to file any declaration where one is due, the amount of the estimated tax for the purposes of this provision will be zero.”
The revision of the section eight months later by the Revenue Act of 1943, c. 63, 58 Stat. 21, did not affect its substance, and this provision, therefore, continued to carry the original gloss. While the Court adverts to this congressional definition, it disregards its controlling significance.*
*96I agree with the construction placed upon the provision by the 'Third, Fifth, aiid 'Ninth Circuits. Abbott v. Commissioner, 258 F. 2d 537 (C. A. 3d Cir. 1958) ; Patchen v. Commissioner, 258 F. 2d 544 (C. A. 5th Cir. 1958); Hansen v. Commissioner, 258 F. 2d 585 (C. A. 9th Cir. 1958).

The essential reliance of the. Court is on its characterization of §294 (d)(2) as a penalty. No adequate justification for this exists. Section 294 (d) (2) on its face indicates that it is in the nature of *96an interest charge, designed to compensate the Treasury for delay in.receipt of funds which a reasonably accurate estimate would have disclosed to be due and owing. Significantly, this charge is imposed regardless of fault, while §294 (d)(1)(A), a true penalty provision, authorizes no addition to tax when the failure to file is shown “to be due to reasonable cause and not to willful neglect.” Had taxpayer here had reasonable cause for failure to file, the 10% addition under § 294 (d) (1) (A) could not have been imposed. Yet taxes would have been withheld by him pending-the filing of a final return for the year. Section 294 (d) (2) provides thé Government a definite means for ascertaining the compensation for this loss of funds.