Lederer v. Penn Mut. Life Ins.

258 F. 81, 169 C.C.A. 167, 1 A.F.T.R. (P-H) 1045, 1919 U.S. App. LEXIS 1160
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Third Circuit
DecidedMay 23, 1919
DocketNo. 2399
StatusPublished
Cited by4 cases

This text of 258 F. 81 (Lederer v. Penn Mut. Life Ins.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Lederer v. Penn Mut. Life Ins., 258 F. 81, 169 C.C.A. 167, 1 A.F.T.R. (P-H) 1045, 1919 U.S. App. LEXIS 1160 (3d Cir. 1919).

Opinion

HAIGHT, Circuit Judge.

The defendant in error (the plaintiff below) sued to recover certain moneys which it claims were illegally assessed and exacted from it, by way of taxes for the year 1913, under the Income Tax Act of October 3, 1913 (38 Stat. L- 166, c. 16). The case was tried without a jury, pursuant to sections 649 and 700 of the Revised Statutes (Comp. St. §.§ 1587, 1668), and resulted in a judgment in favor of the plaintiff for the full amount claimed.

[1] The questions presented depend for their decision upon the construction to be given to certain of the provisions of section 2, G (b), of the before-mentioned act. The plaintiff is a mutual life insurance company without capital stock, conducting its business on what is known as the “level premium plan,” and annually declares “dividends” to its policy holders.- In order to relieve this opinion of the burden of a discussion of the method by which premiums are fixed under the level premium plan, and how and out of what funds the so-called “dividends” to policy holders are declared, we refer to the explanation on pages 202, 203, of the opinion in Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. v. Herold (D. C. N. J.) 198 Fed. 199. That aptly describes -the practice followed by the plaintiff in this case, except that a part of some of the dividends which enter into this controversy were derived from sources other than overpayment of premiums by the policy holders to whom such dividends were paid, as will be hereinafter set forth; but for present purposes the dividends in question [83]*83may be considered as derived from and as representing the excess of the actual premium or premiums previously paid by a policy holder over the subsequently ascertained cost of his insurance for any given year or years. Such excess is included in the premium as a margin of safety, and is in insurance parlance called, and will be fre'quently referred to, as a “redundancy.”

We deem it unnecessary to describe the different kinds of policies involved in this suit, or how and when and why the dividends accumulated and were payable thereon, respectively; it being, we think, sufficient merely to point out that during the tax year of 1913 (from March 1 to December 31, 1913) the plaintiff paid cash dividends— moneys actually paid, as distinguished from dividends used in abatement of subsequent premiums or to purchase paid-up additions to existing policies, etc. — aggregating in amount $683,729.03, to the holders of 10 different kinds of its policies, and that in many cases no premiums were received or due from the same policy holders that year, and in other cases the premiums received from such policy holders were less than the dividends paid to them, respectively. The company claimed the right to exclude the aggregate of those payments from its total income during that period, in order to ascertain the net income upon which, under the act in question, it was required to pay a tax. The government, on the other hand, took the position that the whole of this sum could not be so excluded. Out of these contrary views the present controversy arose.

The act imposed a normal tax “upon the entire net income arising or accruing from all sources” to every domestic insurance compan)-. Subdivision G (a)' of section 2. It also provided that the net income should be ascertained—

“by deducting from the gross amount of the income of such * * * insurance company, received within the year from all sources, * * * tlie net addition, if any, required by law to be made within the year to reserve funds and the sums other than dividends paid within the year on policy and annuity contracts.” Section 2, G (b).

It then, after making special provisions in separate provisos for mutual fire insurance companies and mutual marine insurance companies, contained, in the latter proviso, the following:

“And life insurance companies shall not include as income in any year such portion of any actual premium received from any individual policy holder as shall have been paid back or credited to such individual policy holder, or treated as an abatement of premium of such individual policy holder, within such year.”

The first of these clauses will, for convenience, be hereafter referred to as the “deduction” clause, and the latter as the “noninclusion” clause.

Leaving out of consideration for the moment, the grounds upon which the plaintiff contends that it is entitled to exclude those parts of the dividends paid to policy holders which do not represent the redundancies in the premiums previously paid by such policy holders, the plaintiff’s before-stated contention is based on the proposition that under the “noninclusion” clause-it may exclude from its total in[84]*84come (income derived from all sources) any moneys which it may have paid as dividends to policy holders during the tax year, provided that such payments represent redundancies in premiums previously paid by the same policy holders, irrespective of whether, during the tax year, it received anything by way of premium from them, respectively. The government’s contention proceeds on the theory that dividends paid ■ to a policy holder, or, for that matter, used in abatement of premiums or otherwise credited to a policy holder, may be excluded from the total income in any tax year only when the company has received a premium during the tax year from the individual policy holder to whom the dividend is paid, and then only to the extent of the amount of the premium so received, either actually or theoretically.

These divergent views result from the different interpretations given to the words “portion of any actual premium.” The company would read these words as characterizing the source from which the dividend was derived; that is to say, it would permit the exclusion from the total income of dividends paid or credited to policy holders when they represent redundancies in previous premium payments, without regard to' whether any premiums were received that year from the policy holders to whom the dividends were paid. The government, on the contrary, would read the words as limiting the extent or amount of the dividend paid or credited to the policy holder, which may be excluded from total income, to the sum received by way of premium from that same policy holder during the year in which the dividend is paid or credited to him, without regard to the source from which the dividend was derived or when it became payable. It is also manifest that under the company’s interpretation it is necessary that the policy holders be treated as a whole, while under the government’s contention each-is dealt with separately.

Under the company’s theory, if iff received, for example, by way of premium, from all of its policy holders and from other sources, a total income, in any given tax year, amounting to the sum of $1,000-000, and paid to policy holders, from whom it received no premium whatever that year, dividends amounting to $100,000, and which represented redundancies in premiums previously paid by those same policy holders, it would report as its gross income $900,000, whereas in fact its actual gross income was $1,000,000. The result, of course, would be to produce an erroneous net income, because the latter would be based on a false gross income.

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Bluebook (online)
258 F. 81, 169 C.C.A. 167, 1 A.F.T.R. (P-H) 1045, 1919 U.S. App. LEXIS 1160, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/lederer-v-penn-mut-life-ins-ca3-1919.