William O. Douglas

“ The revenue acts have always treated estates as taxpayers for purposes of income tax. From the adoption of the revenue act of 1918 the Treasury Regulations uniformly provided that if an executor sold estate property he must take as a basis the value of the property at the time of the decedent's death for calculating taxable gain. [10] The Treasury treated the estate's time of acquisition as the date of the decedent's death within the meaning of the sections of the revenue acts from 1921 to 1926. ”

“ Admittedly the date of death would be the proper basis if respondent's interest under the testamentary trust had been a vested remainder. But even a vested remainderman does not have all of the attributes of ownership. So the test in this type of case is not whether respondent had full enjoyment of the property prior to the delivery of the securities to him but whether he earlier had acquired an interest which ultimately ripened into complete ownership. Respondent has become the taxpayer because he has obtained full ownership of the property and has sold it. ”

“ With this background Congress, in adopting the 1934 act, discarded the various basis dates prescribed by the Acts of 1928 and 1932 and harked back to the language which had been used in earlier revenue acts which had uniformly been construed by the Treasury to mean that the basis date was the date when the taxpayer actually acquired as his own the property whose disposition gave rise to a taxable gain or a deductible loss. ”