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September 07, 2017 at 09:19 AM
Sometimes you work really hard and things go well; other times you work just as hard and things go, well, not so well.
In the tax planning business, the job is usually interesting but always complex, and so it is easy (and in all events wise) to be humble. Tax mistakes occur all the time, and the reason we know this is because the mistakes are often widely publicized-through tax court cases in which the IRS prevails, through various IRS enforcement actions, and through the often-scary word-of-mouth lore that is shared among tax professionals about transactions gone horribly awry.
When “Undoing the Deal” Is the Best Solution
What all these circumstances have in common is that, after a transaction has closed, someone discovers that the tax consequences are dramatically worse than originally anticipated. This discovery can lead to acrimony, recrimination and lawsuits. At least some of the time, however, a far better resolution is to consider whether it is possible to rescind or unwind the transaction.
Let’s start with the good news: Both case law and IRS rulings recognize that a complete rescission of a transaction may, under appropriate circumstances, be given full effect for federal income tax purposes to nullify and abrogate a transaction. The seminal authority governing the federal income tax consequences of the rescission transaction are a case, Penn v. Robertson, and an IRS ruling, Rev. Rul. 80-58.
In Penn v. Robertson, the taxpayer, during 1930 and 1931, was allowed to participate in an employees’ stock plan established by the employer corporation without obtaining necessary shareholder approval. The taxpayer was credited with earnings from the plan for 1930 and 1931. After a subsequent shareholder law suit, the plan was rescinded in 1931, and employees who agreed to give up their rights under the plan received back all prior contributions. The IRS attempted to assess income taxes for both 1930 and 1931. The U.S. Court of Appeals held that the rescission would be respected for tax year 1931 (the year of rescission), but not for tax year 1930, since under the “annual accounting period principle” it was not appropriate to recompute income after the close of a taxable year.
In Rev. Rul. 80-58, the IRS adopted the analysis in Penn and ruled that where a contract for the sale of land obligates the seller to accept reconveyance of the land if the buyer is unable to have the land rezoned for his business purposes and to return to the buyer all amounts spent in connection with the sale, the tax consequences of a reconveyance are as follows:
• if the reconveyance takes place in the same year as the original transfer, the original sale is disregarded and thus the rescission extinguishes any income from the sale;
• if the reconveyance occurs in a latter year, the original sale is recognized; any gain or loss to the seller must be reported in the year of sale, and, on the reconveyance, the original seller acquires a tax basis in the property equal to the amount paid by original seller to original buyer for the reconveyance.
Same Tax Year as Transaction
In a subsequent Private Letter Ruling, PLR 9408004, the IRS cited Rev. Rul. 80-58 as standing for the proposition that there are at least two conditions that must be satisfied for the rescission doctrine to apply: (1) the parties to the transaction must be restored to the relative positions they would have occupied had no contract been made; and (2) this restoration must be achieved within the same tax year as the original transaction.
Even the two “core” requirements set forth above can sometimes be subject to exception. For example, there is authority suggesting that, in rare cases, a modification can be given retroactive effect after the close of a tax year. In Rev. Rul. 71-416, retroactive effect was given to a modification nunc pro tunc of a divorce decree two years after the original decree was entered by the court, where the purpose of the modification was to correct a prior computational error. Far more typically, however, the IRS has typically prohibited rescission treatment for steps taken after the close of the taxable year.
Returning Parties to Status Quo Ante
Just as taxpayers must complete the unwinding in the sale tax year, so too must they return all parties to the same position they would have been in but for the transaction. This latter principle was illustrated by the case of Richard L. Hutcheson, where a taxpayer instructed a broker to sell $100,000 worth of Wal-Mart stock in January 1989, but the broker instead erroneously sold 100,000 shares at a price of approximately $30 per share, generating approximately $3 million of sales proceeds.
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Joe Darby, a tax law expert, is also the author of Practical Guide to Mergers, Acquisitions and Business Sales, 2nd Edition, published by The National Underwriter Company, a division of ALM Media. ThinkAdvisor readers can get this resource at a 10% discount. Go there now.
