233-5 West 125th Street Corp. v. Hoey
233-5 West 125th Street Corp. v. Hoey
Opinion of the Court
Plaintiff was organized on April 12, 1916. The purposes stated in its charter were generally improving, managing and dealing in real estate. The first meeting of the incorporators occurred on April 19, 1916. The following day it leased for twenty years a parcel of land to which it had already acquired title and a theatre which it agreed to erect thereon. Some time before 1928 it owned an apartment house which was sold in that year. Other than that apartment house it has never owned any but the theatre property.
A new lease for fifteen years was negotiated and executed in September, 1936. The tenant therein was a different corporation owned by the same interest as was the original tenant. The rental stated in this 1936 lease like the rent in the original was a graduated percentage of the tenant’s gross receipts which included admissions, candy sales, concessions and rent from subleases. If any sublease was of an associate, subsidiary or affiliate of the tenant its gross receipts, to be not less than the gross rents paid by it, were included in the computation in lieu of its rent. If, during the term of the lease, the character of the entertainment changed, a deduction of the cost incurred by the entertainment was to be allowed. The lease guaranteed a minimum rent payable in monthly installments in advance together with the taxes and fire, rent and liability insurance premiums. To calculate rent the lease year commenced on October 1st. The year was then divided into four periods of thirteen weeks each and the tenant was required within fifteen days after the termination of each of such quarterly periods to furnish to the landlord a written statement showing the gross receipts from the first day of October last preceding to the end of the last quarterly period. For such last preceding quarterly period the daily gross receipts were required to be shown. Plaintiff regularly received and examined these reports — its accountant and officers together examined and considered them. The lease then provided that the rent arrived at by applying the percentages stated in the lease to the gross receipts shown in the statement was to be deemed the tentative rent for the period accounted for. Any amount then tentatively appearing due over the aggregate payments theretofore made was to be paid with the delivery of the statement; the
All of the plaintiff’s stock is owned by the A. B. S. Corporation which owns also all of the stock of the Brisbane .Finance Corporation and the Judicious Holding Corporation. The stock of the A. B. S. Corporation is held by a trustee. The trustee of another trust owns all of the stock of the New Jersey General Corporation. Beneficiaries of both trusts were members of one family and through other trusts owned and wholly controlled the stock in at least four other corporations. All of these companies were solvent business corporations organized for profit and, excepting the finance corporation, had substantial assets in the form of real estate. The money of all eight of these corporations was deposited in a bank in a Brisbane Finance Corporation general account. In the case of the plaintiff this was according to a directors’ resolution and the Brisbane Finance Corporation collected its rent as its agent. Originally checks on this account could be drawn by the president who was probably and the secretary who it was testified was in fact the same officer in each of the other corporations. In one clause of the resolution this plaintiff exonerates the depositary from liability for honoring any checks so drawn even to the individual officer without questioning its use or pur
Both depreciation account and accrued surplus consisted of accounts and bills receivable represented by both entries on the books of the plaintiff and the finance corporation or the New Jersey General Corporation or notes of the latter. In 1936 a dividend of $27,000 was paid by the plaintiff, in 1937 a dividend of $18,500 and in 1938 a dividend of $19,500. These were all paid by the plaintiff’s interest bearing note and interest was actually charged to the plaintiff on its books as it accrued on these alleged dividends. Interest also accrued on its accounts receivable and was entered as a credit as it accrued. Other than its real property and the credits in its favor on the books of the finance corporation and some of the other corporations or the New Jersey General note, the plaintiff had no assets. It had no separate office. It paid, as we have indicated, a proportionate share of the expenses of maintaining an office for the organization which embraced all the trusts and the corporations to which we have referred. „ Another of the corporations reported the salaries of all the organization’s employees as its own for their security and unemployment benefits. Plaintiff’s officers were not compensated as such. During the taxable year no stockholders’ meetings were held; one directors’ meeting was held on December 29, 1937.
In July, 1938, plaintiff filed with the defendant’s testator, then the Collector of Internal Revenue for the Second District of New York, its capital stock tax return for the year ending June 30, 1938, claiming therein its exemption from the tax on the asserted ground that it did not do business during the taxable year. The exemption was denied and a tax-assessed which was paid to defendant’s testator on September 5, 1939. A claim for refund was filed on or about July 28, 1941. This claim was rejected by the Commissioner on September 24, 1941, on the following grounds: “Inasmuch as your corporation has not leased its property under a long-term lease at a fixed rental, and since it appears that it is making informal loans to its parent and affili
Article' 42 of Regulations 64, 1938 Edition, says that “no particular amount of business need be done nor is it necessary for the business to be continuous throughout the taxable year.” The case is exceptional in which the activities of a corporation organized for profit do not amount to doing business within the meaning of the act. Edwards v. Chile Copper Co., 270 U.S. 452, 46 S.Ct. 345, 70 L.Ed. 678. Article 43, (a) 4, says that á corporation is in business which is financing, performing any function, or in any other way aiding or serving the general purposes of any affiliated or related company and Article 43, (b) 1, says a corporation is not subject to the tax if it has reduced its activities to the mere owning and holding of property, to distribution of its avails and doing only such acts as are necessary to the maintenance of its corporate existence, but is subject to a tax if nevertheless it engages in other business activities or maintains its organization for the purpose of continued effort in the pursuit of profit or gain.
In McCoach v. Minehill R. Co., 228 U.S. 295, 33 S.Ct. 419, 424, 57 L.Ed. 842, the Court observed that the Minehill R. Co. possessed personal assets in tha form of investments and then said: “The receipt of interest and dividends from invested funds, bank balances, and the like, and the distribution thereof among the stockholders * * * amount to no more than receiving the ordinary fruits that arise from the ownership of property.” In Magruder v. Realty Corporation, 316 U.S. 69, 62 S.Ct. 922, 86 L.Ed. 1278, the Court pointed to the Regulations as appropriate aids toward eliminating confusion and uncertainty. Article 43 of the 1938 Regulations says that “doing business” includes engaging in': “(a) 6 Investment or reinvestment (in the case of a corporation holding securities) of surplus or other funds in additional securities with the exception of the reinvestment of funds realized upon the maturity or redemption of securities.” If regard be had for these regulations then plaintiff is doing business. The form in which this plaintiff has fixed its personalty is not an investment in the sense of that word intended in the regulation. Whether the so-called bills receivable are more than book entries we do not know. The note of New Jersey General Corporation held by this plaintiff, so far as we know is an ordinary I.O.U. If it has a due date that fact has not been proved. Plaintiff has no security for its payment and cannot collect it without either corporate action of the New Jersey General Corporation or a lawsuit because there is no market for the note— none has been proved nor is its existence an assumable fact. We would call this disposition of plaintiff’s reserve and surplus a speculation or at best a so-called business man’s investment, depending wholly on the success of the debtor corporation and demanding continued interest in its affairs. Owning it is a business activity within the sense of the statute. The only investment of accruing funds permitted an exempt corporation is in securities whose value depends on public knowledge, interest and support. See Argonaut Consol. Mining Co. v. Anderson, 2 Cir., 52 F.2d 55. Plaintiff says the Brisbane Finance Corporation is its bank. There is no evidence in this case that the assets of the finance corporation are liquid or the general account large. Its funds are not available on the demand of the plaintiff. To consider it plaintiff’s bank is to accomplish a feat of the imagination. The fact is that the plaintiff made its funds available to the Brisbane Finance Corporation for the use of that corporation and that annually an account was stated and the plaintiff credited to itself whatever debt from the finance corporation appeared in its favor for any undisbursed balance of its income. This is doing business without considering the relationships of the corporations referred to in our findings that borrowed from the finance corporation. If they be taken into consideration plaintiff’s operations are “doing business” within the letter of Article 43, (a) 4 of the Regulations which we have earlier quoted. Phillips v. International Salt Co., 274 U.S. 718, 47 S.Ct 589, 71 L.Ed. 1323; New Haven Sec. Co. v. Bitgood, 2 Cir., 87 F.2d 759; New London Northern R. Co. v. Smith, 2 Cir., 141 F.2d 219. Just what pur
What the Commissioner obviously intended when he held that the plaintiff had not leased its property under a long term lease at a fixed rental was that considering the terms and conditions of the lease and the method and means of collecting the rent plaintiff could not be deemed so inactive as to merit exemption and we agree with him. The history of this plaintiff shows that while it once had title to another property the substantial purpose of its existence and operation was the ownership of the leased theatre property. During the tax year and preceding years plaintiff was doing precisely what it was organized to do. Plaintiff’s certificate gives it no power to operate a theatre nor to produce, or employ anyone to perform in entertainments of any kind. It leased the theatre before building started and never since could do anything but lease it. In Edwards v. Chile Copper Co., supra [270 U.S. 452, 46 S.Ct. 346], the Court said that the appellee there “was organized for profit and was doing what it principally was organized to do in order to realize profit.”
To sustain its claim of error in the'Commissioner’s assignment of want of a fixed rent as ground for his decision plaintiff relies on three cases. In Harrisburg Hotel Co. v. United States, 3 Cir., 145 F.2d 116 and D.C., 51 F.Supp. 436, both Circuit and District Courts exempted the plaintiff from taxation, where the rental under the lease was established by a graduated percentage of the receipts, a fact that was casually accepted. In 1426 ■ Woodward Avenue Corp. v. United States, D.C., 69 F.Supp. 270, where a similar rental was involved, the Court .observed that the Treasury Regulations did not explicitly require a flat rent or otherwise qualify the rent. In affirming Mahoning Coal R. Co. v. Higgins, 2 Cir., 145 F.2d 694, on Judge Lei-bell’s opinion at 57 F.Supp. 717, our Circuit Court approved the exemption of a landlord largely owned by the tenant which paid a rent calculated on a percentage of earnings with a guaranteed minimum. There the point raised by the Government seems to have been that the lease made the parties joint adventurers in the tenant’s operations. The railroad cases are practically irrelevant here anyway. There is no similarity in the position of a corporate lessor of an urban structure and that of the landlord companies in the railroad cases where the lease, always long, is of a right of way, unchangeable in its nature, to a franchise bolder whose advantageous operation of a carrier business thereon is secured by state regulation. Our Circuit Court must have thought so for in Hirsch Improvement Co. v. Commissioner, 2 Cir., 143 F.2d 912, it had taxed the owner whose situation was much like plaintiff’s ■ where one of its leases provided a percentage of sales rent. In the Harrisburg Hotel and Woodward Avenue cases the stock ownerships of landlord and lessee were such that there was no business reason for ..the land
The length of the lease is determinable upon failure to observe a number of covenants. Indeed the termination, dispossess and reletting clauses — the usual ones found in leases of business buildings — manifest that this plaintiff, when the lease was made, contemplated the many vicissitudes that lawyers habitually envisage as real possibilities when letting real estate to the most reliable tenants; fire, condemnation, assignments, subleases and whatnot. Plaintiff fortified itself as well as foresight could devise against those expectable changes. It did not feel secure for a long term of quiet but expressed its intention to exercise continued vigilance.
A necessary condition of any exemption is the distribution of the avails of the lease of the taxpayer’s property and the Commissioner found that this plaintiff failed to so disburse its income. During the taxable year and the prior two years, this corporation distributed its own notes. These may be looked upon as promises of a future distribution but they were not a then present distribution of profit. We are on notice that the two earlier notes were not paid but carried interest during the tax year. Its own accountant carried all as general liabilities in his balance sheet for the end of the tax year as he had to. When taxes, interest and amortization and the operating expense of plaintiff were deducted from its income for the tax year, $25,000, remained. This item is set down as a disbursement in Exhibit 8, described though as an increase in amounts receivable; the finance corporation had it. The evidence that the income of this inexpensively operated plaintiff when its taxes, interest and amortization had been paid was so far beyond its control that it executed and delivered to its stockholder notes, some of them unpaid after two years, whose only purpose apparently is to mask its surplus is incontrovertible proof that the finance corporation was a borrower and not a bank and that plaintiff was conducting a business.
The Commissioner’s reference to plaintiff’s failure to disburse its net income intimates his disapproval of plaintiff’s construction of its considerable surplus. We agree but regard development of this point unnecessary.
Reference
- Full Case Name
- 233-5 WEST 125TH STREET CORPORATION v. HOEY
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