Evans v. Commissioner

30 T.C. 798, 1958 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 135
CourtUnited States Tax Court
DecidedJune 30, 1958
DocketDocket No. 60640
StatusPublished
Cited by15 cases

This text of 30 T.C. 798 (Evans v. Commissioner) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering United States Tax Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Evans v. Commissioner, 30 T.C. 798, 1958 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 135 (tax 1958).

Opinion

The Commissioner determined deficiencies in income tax of the petitioner as follows:

1950 _l_$36,303.24
1951_ 33,228.37
1952 _ 26, 655.48
1953 _ 18,643.55
1954 _ 10,423.77

The only question presented is whether respondent properly included in petitioner’s taxable income for the taxable years dividends paid to a trust of which she was at one time life beneficiary, notwithstanding the alleged fact that prior to such payments she had sold and assigned all of her interests under such trust to her husband who was also trustee of the trust. The parties have stipulated that, due to a mathematical error, the petitioner’s 1954 individual income tax return erroneously stated the dividend credit as $808.34 instead of the correct figure of $751.36, and that this error may be corrected in a Rule 50 computation. ,

FINDINGS OF FACT.

Some, of the facts have been stipulated. The stipulation and exhibits annexed thereto are incorporated herein by this reference.

The petitioner is a resident of Denver, Colorado. She filed her individual income tax returns for the years 1950 and 1951 with the collector of internal revenue for the district of Colorado and for the years 1952, 1953, and 1954 with the district director of internal revenue at Denver, Colorado. She was bom on July 9, 1887, and has been married to John Evans for nearly'50 years. They are the parents of three children and were the grandparents of nine grandchildren in 1950. Petitioner’s husband is president of a Denver bank and chairman of the board of directors of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad Company and of a Denver trust company. Petitioner and her husband are devoted to each other. They live in a large home in Denver and each contributes to its considerable expenses. Petitioner is advised by her husband on all business matters and justifiably has confidence in his ability and integrity.

Prior to September 14,1920, petitioner and her mother, Alice Foster Cheesman (who was born in 1851), owned in equal shares all of the outstanding stock of the Alice Foster Cheesman Realty Company, a Colorado corporation, hereinafter referred to as the corporation, being 1,000 shares of capital stock. They owned 996 of these shares directly. They were also the beneficial owners of the remaining 4 outstanding shares which were registered in the names of others as directors’ qualifying shares. On September 14, 1920, petitioner and her mother executed a trust indenture creating an irrevocable trust, hereinafter referred to as the trust, of which petitioner’s husband, John Evans, was trustee. In and by this trust indenture they conveyed to the trustee all of their right, title, and interest in all of their shares of stock in the corporation for the uses and purposes set out in the trust indenture which provided inter alia:

(1) The net income of the trust should be paid to Alice Poster Cheesman „ Cthe mother) for so long as she lived;
(2) After the death of said Alice Poster Cheesman the net income of the trust should be paid to the petitioner for so long as she survived Alice Poster Cheesman;
(3) Upon the death of petitioner the income of the trust should be paid to the three children of petitioner and their issue, per stirpes, during the lives of her said three children and for 21 years after the death of the last survivor of said children;
(4) Upon the termination of the trust, the trust assets were to be paid over to the remaindermen who were the issue of petitioner’s children, per stirpes.
• (5) In the event petitioner should survive all the remaindermen provided by the trust, the trust estate should revert to petitioner.

Tlie trustee was given all the usual powers of management and control of the trust property and full, absolute, complete, and sole right, power, and authority to exercise all the rights or powers in connection with or with respect to any funds and property of the trust estate.

Pursuant to the provisions of the trust indenture, the stock comprising the corpus of the trust was delivered to John Evans as trustee and the trust became effective on December 14, 1920. In accordance with the terms of the trust.indenture, the net income of the trust was paid over to the petitioner’s mother until her death on January Y, 1928, and thereafter and until December 1, 1950, to the petitioner.

Subsequent to the Supreme Court decisions in the cases of Commissioner v. Estate of Church, 835 U. S. 682 (1949), and Estate of Spiegel v. Commissioner, 335 U. S. 701 (1949), the petitioner’s personal estate was examined by her counsel to ascertain how it would be affected by the holdings in these cases. The petitioner thereafter on recommendation of counsel gratuitously disposed of her interests in two other separate trusts pursuant to the provisions of the Technical Changes Act of 1949. Petitioner had a remote reversionary interest in the first of these trusts. In the second she had a contingent life interest as well as a reversionary interest, but the corpus of that trust was not large and the value of petitioner’s interests therein was approximately $4,000. Petitioner’s counsel were particularly concerned with the trust of September 14, 1920, since the corpus of that trust had considerable value and the full amount of that value appeared to be includible for estate tax purposes in petitioner’s gross estate under the rationale of those Supreme Court opinions.

Since petitioner’s interest in this trust had considerable value and petitioner had need of funds, as described below, petitioner and her advisers did not wish to effect a gratuitous disposition of this interest. Her personal estate had little liquidity and for a number of years her expenditures had exceeded her income. She was in the habit of making gifts to her children and grandchildren, and had done so frequently for many years. By 1950 the only assets of consequence remaining in her estate were the following: (a) 52 per cent of the outstanding stock of the Walter S. Cheesman. Realty Co., a Denver real estate company organized by petitioner’s father; (b) a life interest in 48 per cent of the stock of this realty company under a testamentary trust established by her father’s will; (c) her home where she and her husband had been living since about 1910; and (d) her life interest in the income of the trust involved herein. Petitioner desired money for certain specific projects of her own and also desired an assured source of income for the future. She felt that the homes of her two younger children were inadequate for their large families, and she wanted to give them financial assistance in acquiring larger homes. She also wanted to make repairs and improvements to her own home.

Of the four large assets remaining to petitioner in 1950 neither she nor her husband wanted to part with their home, and the testamentary trust of her father, under which she had a life interest in 48 per cent of the stock of the Walter S. Cheesman Realty Co., contained a provision against alienation so that petitioner could not dispose of this asset.

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Evans v. Commissioner
30 T.C. 798 (U.S. Tax Court, 1958)

Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
30 T.C. 798, 1958 U.S. Tax Ct. LEXIS 135, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/evans-v-commissioner-tax-1958.