Tool Products Co. v. United States

589 F.2d 506, 25 Cont. Cas. Fed. 82,890, 218 Ct. Cl. 486, 1978 U.S. Ct. Cl. LEXIS 308
CourtUnited States Court of Claims
DecidedDecember 13, 1978
DocketNos. 32-72, 445-73 and 281-74
StatusPublished
Cited by11 cases

This text of 589 F.2d 506 (Tool Products Co. v. United States) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering United States Court of Claims primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Tool Products Co. v. United States, 589 F.2d 506, 25 Cont. Cas. Fed. 82,890, 218 Ct. Cl. 486, 1978 U.S. Ct. Cl. LEXIS 308 (cc 1978).

Opinions

NICHOLS, Judge,

delivered the opinion of the court:

This consolidated case involves three petitions for redetermination of excessive profits under 50 U.S.C. App. § 1218. It covers plaintiffs fiscal years ending August 31, 1966, 1968, and 1969, the fiscal year 1967 being omitted because settled. References to years herein will mean the company’s fiscal years unless otherwise stated. The Renegotiation Board determined unilaterally that for 1966 plaintiff realized excessive profits to be eliminated in the amounts of $175,000, for 1968, $225,000, and for 1969, $150,000, in all cases subject to appropriate adjustment and credit for state and federal income taxes. Our duty is to redetermine these amounts de novo, not treating the board statements as proof of the facts or conclusions stated therein. The case has been tried before Trial Judge Wiese, who has submitted a recommended opinion and findings. [490]*490While we find these able and informative, we have decided to state our conclusions in our own words. We adopt as our own, but do not print, the trial judge’s fact findings. The parties do not identify any specific findings they except to. Fact statements in this opinion, not referring to his findings, are based on them and on the record, and may be regarded as additional findings by the court. We conclude that plaintiff realized excessive profits in the amounts of $35,000 for 1966, $127,500 for 1968, and none for 1969, all before the appropriate tax adjustments and credits. The conclusions of the board, the trial judge, and the court, are set forth in tabular form for comparison at the end of this opinion in Table B.

Plaintiff was a small, family-owned corporation, first incorporated in 1960, and located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the early 1960’s its business was primarily custom tool and die making, its customers being industrial concerns. It also engaged in precision machining and performance of secondary or finishing operations on die casting made by others. Before 1966 its business, both renegotiable and other, was under $1,000,000 and therefore non-renegotiable. The total and renegotiable figures for 1966 both exceeded $1,000,000, and therefore plaintiff became subject to renegotiation, but a proceeding for that year was commenced after the later years, apparently because the necessity for filing was overlooked. Plaintiff, beginning in 1964, commenced to expand into die casting. During the review period it was an integrated producer of various ordnance parts, mostly parts of bombs, performing all necessary operations from purchase of the raw material, through delivery of the finished part, ready for assembly in an ordnance item by a prime defense contractor. As regards its former specialty of tool and die maker, it continued this largely with itself as customer, with a nucleus of 35 highly skilled tool and die makers. Table A gives the total and renegotiable sales and profits, from 1963 to 1974, with percentage returns on renegotiable and non-renegotiable sales, subject to the necessary caveat that plaintiff had no cost accounting system, whereby the allocation of costs between renegotiable and non-renegotiable sales is too uncertain to form the basis of any meaningful comparisons. Plaintiff reached a peak of [491]*491renegotiable sales of $2,098,006 in 1968, $2,737,845 in 1969, and a return on renegotiable sales of 26.75 percent in 1968, 21.9 percent in 1969, with sharp declines to follow, losses being recorded in 1971 and after as the table reveals. The findings (78-99) detail the plaintiffs disastrous attempts to reconvert to civilian business, ultimately leading to its being effectively wiped out.

The board made salary disallowances for 1966 and 1968, which were allowed in the proceeding here. This is a large source of differences in the profit figures used. Defendant did not urge disallowances here, though it did urge that the rewards by way of salary to the persons in control of the company should be taken into account in applying the statutory factors, especially the risk factor.

Both sides introduced expert testimony which is of value in places, but in general unsatisfactory. It is too full of theoretical calculations and airy structures of speculation. There is too little solid fact which can be used as a basis of reasoning. Neither expert had any experience with renegotiation until shortly before preparing to testify, which is much like eliciting expert testimony about the value of a piece of real estate from one who has never bought or sold a parcel of land. Since 1942, hundreds of persons have participated in the renegotiation of defense contracts and it is indeed strange none of them were used. Since the trial of this case antedates the warnings we gave in Major Coat Co. v. United States, 211 Ct. Cl. 1, 543 F.2d 97 (1976), defendant benefits from the lenience we promised as to trials that occurred before that date, October 20, 1976. Plaintiff is not asserted to have been the sole supplier of many of the ordnance parts it furnished, yet defendant in no instance supplied price and cost data as to the same parts obtained from other sources, as it easily could have done. Experts on both sides resorted to composite data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service "SIC” tabulations and, a novelty for these cases, reports taken from Dun and Bradstreet’s Key Business Ratios. Details are in the findings. We have considered this data, and find it not very helpful because there is no way to adjust for differences between plaintiffs business and that of the alleged norms. Informed and reasoned renegotiation requires a clear focus on the uniqueness of the individual concern, which use of [492]*492this kind of data tends to blur. It mocks the sanguine promises that proponents of renegotiation have so often made. We accept Dr. Mock’s testimony for defendant, that derives from plaintiffs 1963-65 earnings a composite "normal” figure of 10.4 percent of sales, and we use it as a "starting point” in our analysis, with the caveat that the change already noted in the character of the business requires a corresponding adjustment in Dr. Mock’s "normal” figure. We accept Dr. Donaldson’s testimony for plaintiff that a key factor in the determination of a reasonable level of profit for the review years is the disastrous loss experienced in plaintiffs post-emergency effort at reconversion to civilian business. We are unable to treat it as the sole determinative. These matters are discussed more at length below in our factor analysis.

Neither witness indulged in the pedestrian but necessary business of going through the statutory factors one by one and applying each to the peculiar facts of this case, although Dr. Mock purported to allow credits or bonuses for favorable factors. The trial judge followed too closely the erroneous methodology of his witnesses, making a "special allowance” for risk as Dr. Donaldson recommended though in a lesser amount. Dr. Mock rightly states that there is a logical overlap in the factors, so credits or bonuses, or penalties if applicable, cannot be computed separately and cumulated to reach a result. Perhaps, rather, each factor will suggest a range of allowable profit that would be fair in view of that factor, considered separately, and the figure within all those ranges will be the right one. We conclude that the ratio of profit to sales was high and indicative of excessive profits, but we allow a larger profit as reasonable than did the board or the trial judge. Our determinations are set forth in tabular form in Table B at the end of this opinion.

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Bluebook (online)
589 F.2d 506, 25 Cont. Cas. Fed. 82,890, 218 Ct. Cl. 486, 1978 U.S. Ct. Cl. LEXIS 308, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/tool-products-co-v-united-states-cc-1978.