## Facts

- A group of individual taxpayers received taxable distributions from a partnership.
- The taxpayers hired various professionals to assist in calculating their generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax liability arising from those distributions.
- The taxpayers incurred professional-fee expenses for that GST-related work.
- On their federal income tax returns, the taxpayers deducted a portion of those professional-fee expenses.
- With their income tax returns, the taxpayers did not include a statement indicating that they would not claim those same expenses as deductions against GST tax.
- The taxpayers later filed GST tax returns seeking to deduct, against their GST tax liability, all of the professional-fee expenses they had incurred for the GST-related work.
- The United States brought suit seeking to deny the claimed GST tax deductions.

## Issues

1. Whether taxpayers who deducted a portion of GST-related professional-fee expenses on their income tax returns could also deduct those expenses against GST tax liability.
2. Whether the availability of GST deductions for those expenses turned on the taxpayers’ inclusion of a statement with their income tax returns addressing whether the expenses would be claimed for GST purposes.
3. Whether the United States could obtain relief denying the GST tax deductions based on the taxpayers’ return positions and the governing income/transfer-tax coordination rules.

## Decision

- Publicly available summaries of the case (without the opinion text) identify the dispute and the government’s request for relief but do not provide a reliable account of the court’s final ruling or procedural disposition.
- Based on the accessible case summary, the only outcome-related point that can be stated without speculation is that the United States sued to deny the GST tax deductions claimed on the taxpayers’ GST returns.

## Legal Principles

- Expenses connected to transfer-tax computations (including GST tax) may implicate rules limiting double use of the same expenses across different federal tax regimes (income tax versus transfer taxes).
- Where tax law requires a taxpayer to make an election or provide a statement with a return to control how an expense will be treated across income and transfer taxes, failure to provide that statement may affect the taxpayer’s ability to claim the expense as a deduction for transfer-tax purposes.
- A taxpayer’s prior treatment of an expense on an income tax return can constrain later treatment of the same expense on a GST tax return, depending on the applicable statutes and Treasury regulations.

## Conclusion

Robertson v. United States involved individual taxpayers who incurred professional fees to calculate GST tax owed on taxable partnership distributions, deducted part of those fees on their income tax returns without filing a statement about GST treatment, and then sought to deduct all of the fees on their GST tax returns; the United States sued to bar those GST deductions, but the accessible materials do not reliably state how the court ultimately resolved the merits.


Robertson v. United States, 2006 WL 302302 (2006)