SCOTUS Told Parent-Subsidiary Refund Rule Clashes With Tax Laws

A rule used by multiple appellate courts for deciding who owns a refund doesn’t align with the nation’s tax laws, a petitioner told the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his quest for a $4 million refund, Simon E. Rodriguez, the trustee for the bankruptcy estate of a parent company called United Western Bancorp Inc., told the high court that a rule lower courts use to assume a refund belongs to a subsidiary unless they see clear agreement to something else “is irreconcilable with the scheme that the IRS designed for assigning tax refunds.”

Rodriguez pointed to to how ...