# Microsoft Corporation v. Dept. of Rev.

> Oregon Tax Court · April 29, 2025

URL: https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/10872829

## Case

- **Court:** Oregon Tax Court
- **Decided:** April 29, 2025
- **Precedential status:** Unpublished
- **Opinion:** Opinion
- **Judges:** Manicke
- **Cited by:** 0 later opinions in the Frix Law Library

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## Opinion text

IN THE OREGON TAX COURT
REGULAR DIVISION
Corporation Excise Tax

MICROSOFT CORPORATION, a )
Washington corporation, )
)
Plaintiff, ) TC 5413
v. )
)
DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE, )
State of Oregon, )
) ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION
Defendant. ) FOR RECONSIDERATION

This matter is before the court on Plaintiff’s motion under Tax Court Rule (TCR) 80A for

reconsideration of the court’s August 29, 2024, Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment

(August 29 Order). The first part of the August 29 Order grants relief to Plaintiff to the extent of

concluding that ORS 314.665(6)(a) requires the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount to be

reincluded in the sales factor of Plaintiff’s Water’s Edge Group as a deemed dividend. 1 The

court uses the term “Post-Reinclusion Assessment” to refer to the assessment amount, as reduced

by the dilutive effect of reincluding the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount in the sales factor. The

second part of the August 29 Order rejects Plaintiff’s argument for further factor relief under

Oregon’s “safety valve” statute, ORS 314.667, concluding that Plaintiff failed to carry its burden

1
Terms used in this order have the meanings assigned in the August 29 Order.

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 1 of 13
of proof that even the unreduced assessment violates either the statutory “fairly represent”

standard or constitutional standards. 2

Plaintiff now seeks reconsideration of the second part of the August 29 Order,

specifically objecting to the use of Defendant’s proffered adaptation of the “Augusta Formula”

when testing for constitutional factor relief. That adaptation essentially extends the Augusta

Formula over the nearly twenty-year period during which the CFCs accumulated the earnings

and profits that were deemed distributed in TYE 2018. The adaptation thus includes the sum of

each past year’s Oregon taxable income that would have been due under worldwide combined

reporting, an amount that the court now refers to as the Retrospective Worldwide Amount. 3 The

August 29 Order then compares the Retrospective Worldwide Amount to the assessment.

Because the Retrospective Worldwide Amount is greater than the assessment, the August 29

Order concludes that Plaintiff has not shown that either the original assessment amount or the

Post-Reinclusion Assessment Amount fails the statutory “fairly represent” standard or

constitutional standards. Plaintiff’s motion for reconsideration focuses on why the court should

apply a different version of the Augusta Formula, as described below.

Defendant objects to Plaintiff’s motion but does not itself move for reconsideration of

either part of the August 29 Order, citing the court’s rule disfavoring “[c]laims addressing legal

issues already argued in the parties’ briefs and addressed by the court.” TCR 80A A(4). But

2
The court’s references to the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are to the 2015 edition.
3
Following entry of the court’s August 29, 2024, Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment, the
parties reached a Stipulation on Computational Issues (“Stipulation”), which was filed with the court on January 10,
2025. The court has reviewed the parties’ Stipulation, and the figures therein, and has determined that while it will
result in a slightly different refund amount for Plaintiff, it does not materially change the outcome on any of the
legal issues addressed in this Order or in the Amended Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment. Therefore,
unless otherwise noted, this Order continues to refer to the amounts before the court at the time the August 29 Order
was entered.

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 2 of 13
Defendant urges that, if the court were to grant Plaintiff’s motion, the court should also take up

Defendant’s argument under the first part of the August 29 Order that reinclusion of the 20

Percent Repatriation Amount is inherently distortive. (Def’s Response Reconsider at 9-10.)

In its discretion, the court will reconsider the August 29 Order as requested by Plaintiff,

even though on summary judgment the parties extensively briefed and argued their respective

positions regarding the constitutional fairness requirement on which the Augusta Formula is

based. The court is moved to address Plaintiff’s new, more targeted, arguments in the interest of

judicial economy, because of the potential that they otherwise could be raised for the first time in

a further appeal. See ORS 305.445 (scope of Supreme Court review includes “errors or

questions of law”).

Accordingly, this order will first analyze Plaintiff’s arguments for its version of the

Augusta Formula. Thereafter, this order will also address Defendant’s request, in order to clarify

the court’s reinclusion analysis. For the reasons discussed below, the court will not change its

ultimate conclusions, or any results, under either part of the August 29 Order. The court will

today, however, issue an Amended Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment (Amended

Order) that restates its decision in full, with amendments to portions of its reasoning and

correction of minor errors, most of which were helpfully identified by the parties.

A. Plaintiff’s Arguments

According to Plaintiff, the Retrospective Worldwide Amount is an invalid comparator.

Instead, Plaintiff urges the court to compare the Post-Reinclusion Assessment Amount solely to

the TYE 2018 Oregon taxable income that would have been due under worldwide combined

reporting, a comparator that the court now refers to as a Single-Year Worldwide Amount.

Plaintiff reasons that Congress chose to require taxpayers to include the Federal Repatriation

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 3 of 13
Amount in the tax base for a single tax year, instead of requiring taxpayers to amend their federal

income tax returns for prior years, and a fairness analysis for state apportionment purposes must

be based on that reality. The formula Plaintiff uses to derive its Single-Year Worldwide Amount

is to add the Federal Repatriation Amount to the taxable income of the Water’s-Edge Group for

TYE 2018, then to multiply that sum by a fraction, of which the numerator is Oregon sales for

TYE 2018 and the denominator is the sum of (1) sales everywhere by the Water’s-Edge Group

for TYE 2018 and (2) cumulative sales by the CFCs for TYE 2000 through 2018. (See Ptf’s Mot

Recons at 5, Table 3 (labeled in the motion as “WW Comparison”).

Plaintiff’s proffered Single-Year Worldwide Amount is less than the Post-Reinclusion

Assessment Amount. (Compare Ptf’s Mot Recons at 5, Table 3 (showing TYE 2018 Oregon

taxable income of $112,740,081 as Plaintiff’s Single-Year Worldwide Amount with Ptf’s Mot

Recons at 5, Table 2 (showing TYE 2018 Oregon Taxable Income of $163,223,673 as the court’s

Post-Reinclusion Assessment Amount pursuant to the August 29 Order).) 4 Plaintiff argues that

this fact proves “unconstitutional distortion.” (Ptf’s Mot Recons at 2.) According to Plaintiff,

the court must address this distortion by capping Oregon taxable income for TYE 2018 at the

Single-Year Worldwide Amount. (See Ptf’s Mot Recons at 6 (“Factor relief must be provided so

that Microsoft’s taxable income for TYE 2018 does not exceed the amount that would have been

owed under the worldwide combined reporting method for TYE 2018.”).)

Plaintiff also argues that a Retrospective Worldwide approach is inaccurate because it

“introduces a systematic error into the analysis” that produces a tax result different from a

Single-Year Worldwide Amount. (Ptf’s Reply at 5.) Plaintiff illustrates its point with examples

4
The court notes that the parties’ January 10, 2025, stipulation further reduced the Post-Reinclusion
Assessment Amount to $161,965,650. (See Stipulation on Computational Issues at 2 ¶4.b. (Jan 10, 2025).)

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 4 of 13
involving different profit margins as between a hypothetical water’s-edge group and its CFCs.

Only in the “unusual case where the profitability of the domestic and foreign operations is

identical” is the same amount of income apportioned under both a Retrospective Worldwide

approach and a Single-year Worldwide approach. (Id. at 6.) And where the CFCs have a profit

margin higher than that of the water’s-edge group, the Retrospective Worldwide approach

disfavors the water’s-edge group by apportioning a higher amount of income domestically.

B. Defendant’s Responses

Defendant primarily attacks Plaintiff’s use of a single tax year to gauge the fairness of tax

on unitary dividends built up over many years. (See Def’s Surreply at 3-4.) The Maine Supreme

Court’s approval of the Maine taxing authority’s adoption of the Augusta Formula is premised

on the principle that the worldwide combined reporting method for a unitary group, as approved

in Container Corp., presumably satisfies the constitutional requirements of fairness. See E.I. Du

Pont de Nemours v. State Tax Assessor, 675 A2d 82, 90 (Me 1996) (“The Augusta Formula

simply adopts the worldwide reporting method as a means of verifying the fairness of the tax

liability of the unitary business as established by the tax assessor. The worldwide reporting

method is widely acknowledged as a fair and accurate method of estimating a multijurisdictional

corporation’s taxable business activities in the state, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly

upheld the constitutionality of this method of accounting.”). Therefore, the more a formula

deviates from that method, the more suspect the result becomes as a measure of fairness.

Defendant argues that Plaintiff’s formula incorrectly ignores the basic unitary principle that the

Federal Repatriation Amount must be eliminated from the tax base as a deemed dividend. (See

Def’s Resp Recons at 5 (“Because the worldwide group is looked at as a whole, a proper

application of the worldwide method requires the elimination of intercompany transactions

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 5 of 13
among the members of the worldwide group, including dividends or deemed dividends.”).) And

because the tax base is determined annually, the only reasonably accurate starting point to

estimate the effect of eliminating an intra-group dividend comprising earnings and profits that

have accumulated over many years is to redetermine the entire group’s income for each such

year. According to Defendant, a formula that lacks this retrospective feature strays too far from

a true worldwide combined apportionment method.

Defendant also criticizes Plaintiff’s formula as logically inconsistent. Although Plaintiff

emphasizes the reality that Congress required the Federal Repatriation Amount to be included in

the tax base for only one year, Plaintiff’s formula puts nearly 20 years of cumulative CFC sales

into the sales factor denominator, along with only one year of sales by the Water’s-Edge Group.

Defendant argues that this improperly “ignor[es] the activity of the domestic portion of the

unitary business” over the same time period. (Def’s Surreply at 3.) Defendant essentially views

Plaintiff’s attempt to adhere to Congress’s use of a single tax year as a red herring, given the lack

of any indication that Congress considered state apportionment of income in the TCJA. (See id.

(“Nor did ‘Congress mandate[ ]’ that 19 years of CFC sales be recognized in the sales factor

denominator * * *.”).)

Finally, Defendant rejects Plaintiff’s “systematic error” argument, which depends on

hypothetically different domestic vs. foreign profit margins; Defendant characterizes the

argument as a request for separate accounting based on geography. Defendant quotes the

Court’s rejection of a similar argument by the taxpayer in Container Corp.:

“Appellant * * * argues that its foreign subsidiaries are significantly more profitable than
it is, and that the three-factor formula, by ignoring that fact and relying instead on
indirect measures of income such as payroll, property, and sales, systematically distorts
the true allocation of income between appellant and the subsidiaries. The problem with
this argument is obvious: the profit figures relied on by appellant are based on precisely
the sort of formal geographical accounting whose basic theoretical weaknesses justify

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 6 of 13
resort to formula apportionment in the first place.”

Container Corp. v. Franchise Tax Bd., 463 US 159, 181, 103 S Ct 2933, 77 L Ed 2d 545 (1983).

(See Def’s Surreply at 5-6 (quoting portion of foregoing excerpt).)

C. Analysis and Conclusions as to Single-Year vs. Retrospective Worldwide Methods

Overall, the court understands Plaintiff to contend on reconsideration that the result of

applying the Retrospective Worldwide Comparator is unconstitutionally distortive because it

fails to “actually reflect a reasonable sense of how [the Section 965] income is generated.” Id. at

169. (See August 29 Order at 44.) 5 Plaintiff emphasizes the undisputed fact that the Federal

5
The court rejects three other arguments stated or implied in Plaintiff’s motion for reconsideration. First,
Plaintiff at times seems to criticize a Retrospective Worldwide approach simply because it “depart[s] from the way
that the Formula has previously been applied.” (Ptf’s Mot Recons at 2.) The court rejects the apparent premise that
the court is bound by the precise contours of the Augusta Formula as applied by the sister state of Maine. This court
refers to the Augusta Formula solely for its persuasive value as useful to the ultimate end of testing for fairness.
(See August 29 Order at 48 n 48.)

For the same reason, the court rejects any argument that the worldwide comparator under the Augusta
Formula, or any adaptation thereof, serves only as a cap that requires an automatic refund of any amount of tax
exceeding the result under that comparator. Although the Augusta Formula as approved by the Maine courts
apparently did treat the worldwide comparator as a cap, that was not a feature of the courts’ making. Rather, the
Augusta Formula was a bright-line policy developed by the state taxing agency pursuant to its discretion under
Maine’s “safety valve” statute. Du Pont, 675 A2d at 84, 89-90. The Maine Supreme Court treated the agency’s
formula as an administrative safe harbor, not as a constitutional mandate. See id. at 89 (“we review the Assessor’s
Augusta Formula to determine whether it ensures that Du Pont’s tax liability ‘fairly represents’ its business activity
in the state of Maine consistent with constitutional due process.”) (emphasis added); id. at 90-91 (“Thus, each
calculation pursuant to the Augusta Formula represents permissible means of insuring that the State in its
assessment does not capture extraterritorial value * * *.”) (emphasis added). Indeed, the Maine court emphasized
that the constitutional tests contemplate “rough approximation rather than precision * * *.” Id. at 90. This court
sees no basis to import a rigid notion that the Augusta Formula, or any variation on it, must serve as a cap.

Finally, in the absence of any clear-cut “cap” on the amount of income a state may assign to itself under an
apportionment formula, the requirement to prove “gross” distortion remains. (See August 29 Order at 45-46.) In its
motion for summary judgment, Plaintiff essentially argued that the original assessment, unreduced by reinclusion of
the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount in the denominator of the sales factor, overstates Plaintiff’s Oregon taxable
income by approximately 182 percent. (See id. at 46.) The court concluded that, “if the relative percentage
difference were the only test for unfair apportionment, Plaintiff’s claim would not fail as a matter of law.” (Id.) On
reconsideration, Plaintiff shifts its attention to the Post-Reinclusion Assessment Amount, which, as shown above,
exceeds Plaintiff’s proffered Single-Year Worldwide Amount, but only by approximately 44 percent. This 44
percent increase falls short of the approximately 48 percent increase that the Court sustained in Moorman Mfg. Co.
v. Bair, 437 US 267, 271 n 4, 98 S Ct 2340, 57 L Ed 2d 197 (1978) (upholding state’s income apportionment
formula based solely on in-state sales despite resulting increase in tax base of approximately 48 percent compared to
apportionment based on three equally weighted factors--property, payroll, and sales). Thus, even if the court were
persuaded that Defendant’s Retrospective Worldwide approach is inaccurate, or not reflective of reality, it is
doubtful that the Post-Reinclusion Assessment Amount would rise to the level of “gross” distortion. The court’s
decision that the Retrospective Worldwide Amount is theoretically sound, and thus not “distortive,” makes it

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 7 of 13
Repatriation Amount was triggered by a highly unusual act of Congress. The court disagrees

with Plaintiff’s position and, at least on the factual record in this case, agrees with Defendant’s

objection on this major point. Like all kinds of intercompany transactions, dividends paid within

a unitary group must be eliminated under the kind of worldwide unitary combined reporting

regime approved in Container Corp. See Jerome R. Hellerstein, Walter Hellerstein, Andrew D.

Appleby, 2 State Taxation ¶9.15[5] (3d ed, 2024) (“Under combined reporting, intercompany

transactions, including dividends, interest, and royalties, are eliminated insofar as they reflect

income from the unitary business.”). The main purpose of such a regime is to tax an appropriate

percentage share of the annual income of the entire unitary business enterprise without regard to

lines drawn between corporate members of the group. See e.g. Coca Cola Co. v. Dept. of Rev.,

271 Or 517, 523, 533 P2d 788 (1975) (quoting Keesling and Warren, The Unitary Concept in the

Allocation of Income, 12 Hastings J 42, 46 (1960) (“When the properties and activities within the

jurisdiction are an inseparable portion of a business carried on within and without the

jurisdiction, the computation on the income attributable thereto requires a computation of the

income of the business as a whole or as a unit and an apportionment or allocation of the total to

the various parts.”).) And those lines can greatly affect the timing of recognition of income: for

example, the price that one affiliate charges another for goods, services, or intellectual property

can allow profit to build up in one or the other of them until a dividend or other realization event

occurs in a later year. Determining the worldwide combined income of the overall enterprise

requires the unwinding of deferrals arising from intercompany transactions and thus the

redetermination of enterprise-wide income for the years to which those transactions relate, at

unnecessary to decide whether the Post-Reinclusion Assessment is “grossly” distortive.

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 8 of 13
least when numerous tax years are involved. 6 While it is true that Congress did not require

taxpayers to redetermine federal income for prior years, or file amended returns, Moore v. United

States leaves no doubt that Congress’s goal was to create a one-time increase in the tax base that

was entirely consistent with Defendant’s Retrospective Worldwide adaptation of the Augusta

Formula. See Moore v. United States, 602 US 572, 144 S Ct 1680, 219 L Ed 2d at 285-86

(“[T]he 2017 Act imposed a one-time, backward-looking tax on that accumulated income. That

backward-looking tax * * * attributed the long-accumulated and undistributed income of

American-controlled foreign corporations to American shareholders * * *.”). Like the

substantially reduced special federal tax rate that Congress applied to the Federal Repatriation

Amount, the requirement to add that amount to only a single year’s income may simply have

been a practical modification to reduce the administrative burden for taxpayers and the

government alike.

As to Defendant’s criticism that Plaintiff’s Single-Year Worldwide method is logically

inconsistent, the court believes that the real problem lies in Plaintiff’s use of a single year’s tax

base, as just discussed. Once the die is cast in favor of abandoning nearly 20 years of intragroup

6
The Maine decisions involving the Augusta Formula do not distinguish between dividends paid out of
current-year vs. accumulated earnings and profits, but at least some portion consisted of subpart F income, which at
that time consisted, by definition, of current-year earnings and profits. See Du Pont De Nemours & Co. v. State Tax
Assessor, 1995 WL 18022834, at *1 (Me Super Mar 3, 1995) (“Under sections 951 through 964 of the Internal
Revenue Code, du Pont and domestic affiliates were deemed to have received additional dividends (the ‘Subpart F
income’) from certain of the unitary foreign subsidiaries.”); IRC § 952(c)(1)(A) (1986) (in part) (“the subpart F
income of any controlled foreign corporation for any taxable year shall not exceed the earnings and profits of such
corporation for such taxable year.”). To the extent that this court breaks new ground in requiring redetermination of
the unitary group’s prior-year income under the Retrospective Worldwide approach, the court reiterates that the data
to do so generally should be available using the records required to be kept under federal law to distinguish between
a distribution “out of [the corporation’s] earnings and profits,” constituting a taxable dividend, and one that is a
nontaxable return of capital. See IRC § 316(a) (defining “dividend”); Boris I. Bittker & Laurence Lokken, 4
Federal Taxation of Income, Estates and Gifts, ¶ 92.1.3 (3d ed, 2003) (“Because there is no statute of limitations on
the effect of prior transactions on accumulated earnings and profits, permanent retention of corporate records is
advisable.”) (footnote omitted). In this case, at least, Defendant was able to redetermine worldwide combined
income for the prior years using data from Plaintiff. (See August 29 Order at 48 (“Plaintiff does not contest the
accuracy of Defendant’s calculations [under the Augusta Formula], only their relevance.”).)

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 9 of 13
eliminations and thus abandoning the redetermination of enterprise-wide income, it becomes

difficult to construct a coherent rationale for other components of a worldwide formula.

Finally, the court also agrees with Defendant that Plaintiff’s hypothetical examples of

different profit margins for the water’s-edge group vs. the CFCs are, in substance, a request for

separate accounting incompatible with the unitary worldwide combined theory approved in

Container Corp. As the Court first stated in Mobil Oil Corp. v. Vermont, 445 US 425, 437, 100

S Ct 1223, 63 L Ed 2d 510 (1980):

“[S]eparate accounting, while it purports to isolate portions of income received in various
States, may fail to account for contributions to income resulting from functional
integration, centralization of management, and economies of scale.”

See also Container Corp., 463 US at 181 (rejecting similar argument); see generally Hellerstein

at ¶ 8.03 (explaining drawbacks of separate accounting generally). Similar arguments regarding

the relative profitability of individual entities engaged in a unitary business were ultimately

rejected by the Maine Supreme Court in Du Pont. In that case, the taxpayer successfully argued

before the Superior Court, relying on the court’s internal consistency analysis in Tambrands, that

the Augusta Formula is not internally consistent when applied to a unitary business whose

subsidiaries are more profitable than the parent. Du Pont, 1995 WL 18022834, at *4 (Me Super

Mar 3, 1995) (“The class of unitary businesses to which du Pont belongs, those with unitary

foreign affiliates that are, in the aggregate, more profitable than the domestic affiliated group,

will just as inevitably be subject to tax on more than 100% of the income of the unitary business

under the Augusta Formula applied in all jurisdictions.”). However, the Maine Supreme Court

ultimately came to understand its internal consistency analysis in Tambrands as flawed,

abandoning it in Du Pont. See Du Pont, 675 A2d at 89 (“It is now clear to us that in applying the

internal consistency test in Tambrands, we improperly applied the test to two different taxpayers-

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 10 of 13
-Tambrands and its subsidiaries--rather than to just Tambrands. Moreover, by misidentifying the

taxpayer in our application of the internal consistency test in Tambrands we insured that no

apportionment method other than complete exclusion of the foreign subsidiaries’ income and

dividends would satisfy the test.”).

D. Defendant’s Objection That Reinclusion Is Inherently Distortive

The court now turns to Defendant’s request that the court address Defendant’s argument

that reinclusion of the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount in the denominator of the sales factor

causes an inherently distortive amount of income to be assigned to Plaintiff’s state of commercial

domicile. In part, Defendant grounds its request in the court’s discussion of the concept of

“income-producing activities,” particularly in footnote 25 of the August 29 Order. As Defendant

points out, “[a]t times, the court appears to suggest that the relevant income-producing activity is

the CFCs’ activity, rather than the activity of some member of the Water’s Edge Group. * * *

But in that case, the 20 Percent Repatriation [Amount] would be included in the sales numerator

of no state applying a water’s-edge regime, which necessarily excludes the CFCs. Such a

method is inherently dilutive.” (Def’s Resp Recons at 3 (emphasis in original).)

The court agrees that the August 29 Order is unclear on this point. As will be reflected in

the Amended Order, for purposes of reinclusion under ORS 314.665(6)(a), the 20 Percent

Repatriation Amount must be sourced as a dividend, because the legislature’s decision in 1984 to

adopt a water’s-edge reporting regime prescribed that result by putting an end to worldwide

combined reporting and the elimination of intragroup dividends. Therefore, as with any other

dividend that is business income, it is the location or locations of the income-producing activities

of the water’s-edge group, and the costs of performing those activities, that determine the state,

or states, to which the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount is sourced.

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 11 of 13
There is little case law or other guidance on how to identify those activities, where the

payor and payee of a dividend engage in the same unitary business but do not join in the same

tax return. Specifically, courts have not clearly identified whether the relevant activities are

those that trigger payment of the dividend, or those related to managing and participating in the

underlying unitary business activities engaged in by entire worldwide group, or both such types

of activities. Nevertheless, the inquiry is clearly factual, setting a high bar for assertions that any

particular result is “inherently” distortive. It is also clearly incorrect to frame the inquiry by

reference to activities performed by the CFCs as opposed to activities performed by the water’s-

edge group. For these two reasons, Defendant’s concern that the 20 Percent Repatriation

Amount would necessarily be “included in the sales numerator of no state” is unfounded.

Defendant’s objection thus reduces to one of two assertions:

• To the extent that Defendant argues as a matter of law that assigning the 20 Percent
Repatriation Amount to any single state is somehow inherently distortive, the court
rejects Defendant’s position because the requirement in ORS 314.665(4)to source sales to
the location of the greater proportion of income-producing activities based on costs of
performance squarely contemplates factual analysis. The statute provides no shortcut to
that work.

• To the extent that Defendant argues as a matter of fact that assigning this Plaintiff’s 20
Percent Repatriation Amount to the state of Washington is inherently distortive, the
record before the court does not support that conclusion. Suffice it to say that well over
one-half of all Water’s Edge Group employees were located in Washington, as were
Plaintiff’s headquarters. Under any definition of the income-producing activities giving
rise to the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount, these facts do not support a conclusion that
assigning receipts to Washington is inherently distortive; if anything, they tend to suggest
that the greater proportion of those activities may well have been in Washington. Now,
therefore,

///

///

///

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 12 of 13
IT IS ORDERED that

(1) Plaintiff’s motion for reconsideration is granted;

(2) Upon reconsideration, the court adheres to the overall conclusions reached in its

August 29, 2024, Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment, granting and denying in part

each party’s cross-motion;

(3) Amendments and corrections to the August 29, 2024, order are reflected in the

Amended Order filed separately today; and

(4) A marked copy of the Amended Order is attached hereto as Exhibit A.

Dated this 29th day of April, 2025.

ORDER ON PLAINTIFF’S MOTION FOR
RECONSIDERATION TC 5413 Page 13 of 13
Exhibit A

IN THE OREGON TAX COURT
REGULAR DIVISION
Corporation Excise Tax

MICROSOFT CORPORATION, )
a Washington corporation, )
)
Plaintiff, ) TC 5413
v. )
)
DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE, )
State of Oregon, ) {AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-
) MOTIONS FOR SUMMARY
Defendant. ) JUDGMENT

I. INTRODUCTION AND CONCLUSIONS

{This order amends and restates the court’s August 29, 2024, Order on Cross-

Motions for Summary Judgment. Amendments result from Plaintiff’s Motion for

Reconsideration dated October 9, 2024, and the parties’ subsequent briefing followed by

oral argument on January 14, 2025. Further explanation of the parties’ arguments that

have prompted amendments, as well as a marked copy showing the changes in this order,

are found in the court’s Order on Reconsideration, issued today.}

This is the second recent case in this court involving “deemed dividends” arising under

subpart F of the Internal Revenue Code. 1 Subpart F generally deems earnings and profits of

“controlled foreign corporations” (CFCs) to have been distributed annually to their significant

1
Unless otherwise indicated, references to the Internal Revenue Code (IRC or the Code) are to the federal
Internal Revenue Code of 1986, title 26 of the United States Code, as amended by the 2017 act commonly known as
the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Pub L 115-97, 131 Stat 2054 (2017), and as otherwise amended and in effect for the tax
year at issue in this case. The portion of the Code commonly referred to as subpart F consists of sections 951
through 965.
domestic shareholders as an addition to the shareholders’ federal gross income, if those earnings

and profits have not been subject to federal income tax in the hands of the CFCs. 2 See IRC §

951. The earlier case, Oracle Corp. and Subsidiaries II v. Dept. of Rev., 24 OTR 359, 360

(2021) (Oracle II), involved tax years well before 2017, when subpart F’s deemed distribution

requirement applied only to certain types of “mostly passive income” earned during the tax year,

thus allowing federal income tax on other types of CFC earnings and profits to continue to be

deferred indefinitely. Moore v. United States, 602 US [___,]{572,} 144 S Ct 1680, 219 L Ed 2d

275, 281 (2024). The main difference is that this case involves a one-time requirement, enacted

in 2017 and likewise codified in subpart F, to apply the same deemed dividend treatment to up to

31 years’ worth of CFC earnings and profits on which United States taxation had been deferred

under subpart F. 3 The court refers to this one-time amount, determined under federal law, as the

“Federal Repatriation Amount.”

The requirement to add the Federal Repatriation Amount to income was a single,

transitional provision of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). See Pub L 115-97, § 14103,

131 Stat 2054, 2195 (2017) (amending IRC § 965). Other provisions imposed a greatly reduced

federal tax rate on the Federal Repatriation Amount, provided extended time to pay the

additional federal tax, and prospectively changed substantial features of the federal taxation of

multinational businesses. Oregon incorporated the federal requirement to add the Federal

Repatriation Amount to income but did not set a lower tax rate for that amount. However,

Defendant determined that an existing 80 percent “subtraction” available to certain corporate

2
In this order, a “domestic” corporation refers to one incorporated under the laws of any state of the United
States or under the laws of the United States; a “foreign” corporation refers to any other corporation. See IRC §
7701(a) (4)-(5).
3
In this case, the deferral period is shorter; it included earnings and profits that had “accumulated since the
early 2000s.” (Stip Facts at 3, ¶ 11.)

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taxpayers applied. The court refers to the amount remaining after subtracting 80 percent of the

Federal Repatriation Amount as the “20 Percent Repatriation Amount.”

The issues in this case involve how to determine Oregon’s apportioned share of the 20

Percent Repatriation Amount, applying Oregon’s version of the Uniform Division of Income for

Tax Purposes Act (UDITPA). See ORS 314.615 (requiring apportionment when taxpayer has

income from business activity taxable within and without Oregon); ORS 314.605(1) (defining

ORS 314.605 to 314.675 as UDITPA). 4

Plaintiff, as the domestic common parent corporation of numerous domestic and foreign

subsidiaries, had a large Federal Repatriation Amount during the tax year at issue, the fiscal and

tax year ending on June 30, 2018 (TYE 2018). Applying Defendant’s published guidance on the

TCJA when filing its original Oregon return for TYE 2018, Plaintiff included the 20 Percent

Repatriation Amount in its income but did not include any portion of the Federal Repatriation

Amount in either the numerator or the denominator of the apportionment fraction, which consists

of gross receipts (“sales”) in Oregon over gross receipts everywhere. Subject to certain

computation issues to be resolved by the parties, the court refers to the amounts of Oregon

taxable income and tax, as shown on the original return, as the assessment. 5

Plaintiff paid the tax pursuant to the assessment but immediately applied for a partial

refund, claiming a right to increase the denominator by the amount of the Federal Repatriation

4
Unless otherwise noted, the court’s references to the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are to the 2015
edition.

5
{Following entry of the court’s August 29, 2024, Order on Cross-Motions for Summary
Judgment, the parties reached a Stipulation on Computational Issues (“Stipulation”), which was
filed with the court on January 10, 2025. The court has reviewed the parties’ Stipulation, and the
figures therein, and has determined that while it will result in a slightly different refund amount for
Plaintiff, it does not materially change the outcome on any of the legal issues addressed in the
Amended Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment or the Order on Reconsideration.
Therefore, in this Order the court continues to refer to the parties’ positions as they existed at the
time the original Order on Cross-Motions for Summary Judgment was entered.}

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Amount, which would reduce Oregon’s fractional share of Plaintiff’s overall taxable income.

See Table 1 in Part IV, below. Defendant denied the refund, adhering to its published position

that no amount could be included in either the numerator or the denominator. Plaintiff appeals,

presenting two main theories for its refund claim. 6

First, Plaintiff relies on the court’s analysis, in Oracle II, of the definition of “sales” in

ORS 314.665(6)(a). That definition initially excludes deemed dividends under subpart F because

they “aris[e] from the * * * holding of intangible assets”; however, an exception treats those

amounts as sales if they are “derived from the taxpayer’s primary business activity.” Oracle II

determined that subpart F amounts are sales under the exception if the CFC and the taxpayer

were engaged together in a single unitary business and the CFC’s earnings and profits

constituting the subpart F amounts are from a single “primary business activity” shared by the

CFC and the taxpayer. The court refers to this statutory interpretation theory as “reinclusion” of

the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount in the sales factor. 7

Second, Plaintiff seeks what is known informally as “factor representation” or “factor

relief” under ORS 314.667, which allows a taxpayer to request an alternative allocation and

apportionment method if the statutory method (1) fails to “fairly represent” the extent of the

6
Plaintiff’s first four claims seek declaratory relief. (See Ptf’s First Amend Compl at 25-28). As a
procedural matter, the court agrees with Defendant that Plaintiff is not entitled to declaratory relief, as Plaintiff has,
and has exercised, a complete remedy by claiming a refund. See Fields v. Dept. of Rev., 19 OTR 547, 550 (2009)
(“In this case, taxpayers have a complete remedy available to them, if they are correct legally, in the form of
proceedings under ORS 305.270 for refund. In such a case where a timely specific statutory remedy exists, courts
should not entertain declaratory judgment actions.”). Having concluded that Plaintiff is not entitled to the
declaratory relief it seeks, the court treats the substance of Plaintiff’s first four claims for relief as supporting its
refund claim and its motion.
7
Defendant, which was barred procedurally from appealing Oracle II to the Supreme Court, contests the
reinclusion theory.

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taxpayer’s business activity in Oregon, or (2) is unconstitutional. 8 In all of its arguments,

Plaintiff generally challenges the assessment as inaccurate and unfair.

The court agrees with Plaintiff as to its first theory. The court adheres to, and further

explains, its reinclusion analysis in Oracle II. However, reinclusion does not fully resolve the

parties’ cross-motions because the refund amount under reinclusion is somewhat less than one-

half the amount Plaintiff requests. See Table 2 in Part IV, below. Nominally, Plaintiff pursues

its two theories independently, such that the court’s decision that reinclusion applies simply

reduces the amount at issue for factor relief purposes. However, Plaintiff fails to make any

specific argument about the inaccuracy or unfairness of that reduced amount at issue. Plaintiff

instead confines itself to arguing that the assessment, unmodified by reinclusion of the 20

Percent Repatriation Amount in the sales factor denominator, is inaccurate and unfair. Plaintiff

thus has failed to carry its burden of proof that it is entitled to factor relief beyond what

reinclusion already provides. For this reason, the court will grant summary judgment to Plaintiff

in part, to the extent of awarding a refund computed under reinclusion, but the court must deny

any further relief under a factor representation theory.

Mindful, however, that the Oregon Supreme Court has not had occasion to review this

court’s reinclusion analysis in the context of deemed dividends, the court proceeds to review

Plaintiff’s arguments for factor relief under ORS 314.667 based on the unmodified assessment.

As to the “fairly represent” statutory standard, Plaintiff argues that including the 20

Percent Repatriation Amount in taxable income without changing the apportionment factor is

inherently inaccurate and unfair because the addition of a large amount of income to the tax base,

with no increase in the denominator of the apportionment percentage, results in a tax amount that

8
The court did not address factor relief in Oracle II.

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is necessarily inaccurate. However, based on the legislative history of the 1984 act, the court

concludes that the 80 percent subtraction under ORS 317.267(2)(b), including for dividends from

foreign subsidiaries excluded from an Oregon consolidated return, functions as a form of factor

representation in Oregon’s water’s-edge system. This leaves only the question whether the

degree of factor representation that Oregon provides is sufficiently accurate or fair.

Considering Plaintiff’s proposals for alternative methods for insight on its fairness

arguments, the court is not persuaded that the assessment violates the statutory “fairly represent”

standard. See Table 3 in Part IV, below.

• The first proposal would add to the denominator 20 percent of the CFCs’ gross receipts.
The court finds that this proposal goes too far in relying on the connection between the 20
Percent Repatriation Amount and the unitary business activities of the CFCs. Although
the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount is eligible for reinclusion because it is “derived
from” activities shared by all members of the Worldwide Group, the fact remains that the
amount is a dividend in the hands of the Water’s-Edge Group because Oregon’s water’s-
edge law prevents it from being eliminated from income as an intercompany transaction
and instead causes it to arise from the holding of an intangible. As a dividend, it is
already a gross receipt. It is reasonable to assign that gross receipt, once, to the sales
factor denominator, but to assign a multiple of the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount to the
denominator, as Plaintiff proposes, would fail to recognize its character as a dividend.

• The second proposal would include 100 percent of the Federal Repatriation Amount in
the denominator. Plaintiff’s proffered reasoning is thin and reveals that it simply seeks to
replicate the amount of the CFCs’ gross receipts as under its first proposal.

• Plaintiff’s third proposal, separate accounting, would exclude the 20 Percent Repatriation
Amount from the tax base altogether, which the court finds goes too far in the opposite
direction, completely ignoring the unitary nature of the overall business enterprise and
treating the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount as nonbusiness income or as a dividend from
a subsidiary with which the Water’s Edge Group lacks either enterprise unity or asset
unity.
Turning to Plaintiff’s claims for factor relief based on unconstitutionality of the

assessment, the court rejects Plaintiff’s argument that the assessment violates the requirement,

under cases interpreting the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution, that income be

“fairly apportioned” to Oregon, as well as the “nexus,” antidiscrimination, and “fairly related”

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requirements. Among other conclusions, the court determines that the assessment is not “grossly

distortive” because it essentially recaptures--at a lower cost to the taxpayer--income that never

would have been deferred in the first place under worldwide combined reporting. As applied to

these facts, the court is persuaded by Defendant’s analysis applying the so-called “Augusta

Formula” [developed]{approved} by Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court. Relatedly, under cases

applying the Foreign Commerce Clause, the court finds no “enhanced risk of multiple taxation”

in the assessment, given the United States Supreme Court’s acceptance of worldwide combined

reporting and the lesser burden that the assessment actually imposes on the Water’s Edge Group

in this case. Finally, Plaintiff’s Due Process argument fails for the same reasons that the court

finds the assessment not grossly distortive under the Commerce Clause.

II. LEGAL BACKGROUND

A. State Law Concepts

Relevant background on the following subjects can be found in prior cases and the

decisions cited there:

• The “unitary business” concept, a creature of state and local tax law, which generally
seeks to determine the overall income of an integrated enterprise. This can involve
treating a group of entities under common ownership and engaged together in a unitary
business as though they were a single entity, “eliminating” intercompany transactions.
By contrast, a “separate” accounting system determines each entity’s income by
measuring its transactions with other entities based on actual or hypothetical “arm’s-
length” pricing. See Oracle II, 24 OTR at 363.

• “Apportionment” of the income of a unitary business by formula, as a way to attribute a
percentage of overall income to a particular state. The apportionment formula typically is
the ratio of in-state sales to sales everywhere (the sales “factor”), but it may include
property, payroll, or other factors. See id. at 363-65. 9

9
Over time, Oregon shifted from using three factors to using only the sales factor. See Or Laws 1965, ch
152, §§ 10, 26 (three-factor apportionment method equally weighting sales, property, and payroll factors). The
three-factor method applied until 1989, when the legislature adopted a double-weighted sales factor method,
applicable to tax years beginning on or after January 1, 1991. See Or Laws 1989, ch 1088, §§ 1, 2. A decade later,
the legislature again increased the formula’s reliance on the sales factor, changing the double-weighted sales factor
method to an 80 (sales)/10 (property)/10 (payroll) method. See Or Laws 2001, ch 793, § 1. This change applied to

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• State tax return and reporting methods, commonly either a “combined report” or a
“consolidated return,” that reflects the income of multiple entities engaged in the unitary
business. See id. at 365-66; ABC Inc. & Combined Affiliates v. Dept. of Rev., TC 5431,
2024 WL 2146943 at *17-19 (Or Tax, May 14, 2024). By contrast, some states use a
“separate return” method by which each entity files its own return. See, e.g., Mobil Oil
Corp. v. Com’r of Taxes of Vermont, 445 US 425, 430, 100 S Ct 1223, 63 L Ed 2d 510
(1980).

• “Worldwide” combined or consolidated reporting (in which the income of the unitary
business is determined without regard to national borders), as opposed to a “water’s-
edge” limitation that excludes entities formed under the laws of foreign countries from
the group and thus generally excludes the income of foreign entities from the tax base.
The federal tax system historically has used consolidated returns for related domestic
corporations but has excluded foreign corporations from the consolidated group, thus
requiring separate accounting, at arm’s-length pricing, to determine a domestic group’s
income from transactions with its foreign affiliates. Oracle II, 24 OTR at 366-68.

• Treatment of dividends as business income or nonbusiness income. Oracle II, at 368-74.

As to the issues in this case, the affiliates comprising the Water’s-Edge Group, including

Plaintiff, generally are a single taxpayer because they have joined together in filing a

consolidated Oregon return. See ORS 317.710(5)(c); cf. ABC Inc.2024 WL 2146943 at *7-14

(discussing exception to one-taxpayer rule, not relevant for purposes of these cross-motions, in

second sentence of ORS 317.715(3)(b)).

B. Subpart F

In Moore v. United States, the United States Supreme Court recently summarized the

development of the subpart F regime and the 2017 requirement to add the Federal Repatriation

Amount to subpart F income:

“For legal and practical reasons, Congress generally does not directly tax foreign
corporations, including American-controlled foreign corporations, on the income
that they earn outside of the United States. Instead, Congress has imposed some
taxes on income of those corporations on a pass-through basis.

tax years beginning on or after May 1, 2003. Id. at § 2. Finally, in 2005, the legislature adopted a single-sales-
factor method for tax years beginning on or after July 1, 2005. See Or Laws 2005, ch 832, §§ 48-48a.

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“Most notably, starting in 1962, in what is known as subpart F of the Internal
Revenue Code, Congress has treated American-controlled foreign corporations as
pass-through entities: Subpart F attributes income of the corporation to American
shareholders, and taxes those American shareholders on that income. 26 U. S. C.
§§951–952. But subpart F applies only to a small portion of the foreign
corporation’s income, mostly passive income.

“In 2017, Congress passed and President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act. 131 Stat. 2054. In a variety of ways not relevant to this case, the Act altered
the United States’ approach to international corporate taxation. The primary goal
was to encourage Americans who controlled foreign corporations to invest
earnings from their foreign investments back in the United States instead of
abroad.

“As relevant here, one piece of that intricate and multifaceted 2017 Act imposed a
new, one-time pass-through tax on some American shareholders of American-
controlled foreign corporations. That one-time tax addressed one of the problems
that had arisen under the old system: For decades before the 2017 Act, American-
controlled foreign corporations had earned and accumulated trillions of dollars in
income abroad that went almost entirely untaxed by the United States. The
foreign corporations themselves were not taxed on their income. And other than
subpart F, which applies mostly to passive income, the undistributed income of
those foreign corporations was not attributed to American shareholders for the
shareholders to be taxed.

“As part of the complicated transition to a more territorial system, the 2017 Act
imposed a one-time, backward-looking tax on that accumulated income. That
backward-looking tax is known as the Mandatory Repatriation Tax or MRT.
§965. Similar in structure to subpart F, the MRT attributed the long-accumulated
and undistributed income of American-controlled foreign corporations to
American shareholders, and then taxed those American shareholders on their pro
rata shares of that long-accumulated income at a rate from 8 to 15.5 percent.
§§965(a), (c), (d).”

Moore, 219 L Ed 2d at 285-86 (footnote omitted).

The issue in Moore was whether the requirement to add the Federal Repatriation Amount

to subpart F income was a “tax[ ] on incomes” allowed without apportionment among the states

under the Taxing Clause, the Direct Tax Clause, and the Sixteenth Amendment to the United

States Constitution. See Moore, 219 L Ed 2d at 286; see generally US Const, Art I, § 9, cl 4

(“No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
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Enumeration * * *.”); see also id., § 2, cl 3 (“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be

apportioned among the several States * * * according to their respective Numbers * * *.”); id.

Amend XVI (“The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from

whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to

any census or enumeration.”). The taxpayers, American shareholders of a foreign corporation,

argued that the requirement did not constitute an “income” tax because, as to them, there had

been no “realization” of income when the Amount was merely deemed to have been distributed

to them without the transfer of any cash. Moore, 219 L Ed at 288 (“And the Moores contend that

the [requirement to include the Federal Repatriation Amount in subpart F income] does not tax

any income that they have realized.”); see generally Boris I. Bittker & Lawrence Lokken,

Federal Taxation of Income, Estates and Gifts ¶ 5.2 (discussing concept of realization). The

Court rejected the taxpayers’ argument, concluding that it was unnecessary to decide whether a

realization event is a required component of an income tax, because the CFC had realized the

income in the course of its business before subpart F caused that income to be “attributed” to the

Moores:

“So the precise and narrow question that the Court addresses today is whether
Congress may attribute an entity’s realized and undistributed income to the
entity’s shareholders or partners, and then tax the shareholders or partners on their
portions of that income. This Court’s longstanding precedents, reflected in and
reinforced by Congress’s longstanding practice, establish that the answer is yes.”

Moore, 219 L Ed at 288 (footnote omitted); see also id. at 291 n 3 (“Because the MRT taxes

realized income--namely, income realized by the corporation and attributed to the shareholders--

we do not address the Government’s argument that a gain need not be realized to constitute

income under the Constitution.”).

More detailed explanation of the integration of the TCJA into the subpart F regime is

found in a leading treatise. Joel D. Kuntz & Robert J. Peroni, 1 US International Taxation ¶

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B3.01 (March 2024). The United States generally taxes domestic US corporations on their

worldwide incomes, reducing the possibility of double taxation by allowing a credit for tax paid

to foreign countries. See id. at ¶ A1.03[1]. However, for tax years starting on or after January 1,

2018, the TCJA created a new deduction that departs significantly from this “worldwide” model

and tilts toward a “territorial” model in which federal taxable income is based more on domestic-

source income:

“Added in 2017 by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Section 245A allows a deduction
to certain domestic corporations that own stock in certain foreign corporations.
The deduction is for the foreign-source portion of a dividend that the domestic
corporation receives from the foreign corporation. The intended effect of the
deduction, which when applicable covers 100 percent of the foreign-source
component, is the exemption of foreign earnings from U.S. taxation.”

Id. at B6.02A[1] (footnotes omitted). For the last tax year before the new deduction became

effective, substantial amendments to Section 965 created the one-time inclusion of the Federal

Repatriation Amount that is subject to apportionment in this case:

“In 2017, Congress completely revised Section 965 as part of major revisions to the U.S.
international tax system. Providing a counter-balance to the Section 245A deduction for
dividends received from certain foreign corporations, the amended version of Section 965
required, in a one-year transition period, that U.S. shareholders include in their gross
incomes certain amounts of income that such corporations had previously earned and
accumulated without payment of U.S. tax. To cushion the blow, low rates of tax were
imposed on those amounts, and the U.S. shareholders were given years to pay the tax.

“Roughly speaking, the combined effect was to tax the U.S. shareholders, at the favorable
rates, as if the tax-deferred earnings had been repatriated as dividends just prior to the
adoption of the new international tax regime. Thereafter, actual distributions of the same
earnings are not to be taxed.”

Id. at ¶ B3.04A[1] (footnote omitted). Congress framed the one-time inclusion of Federal

Repatriation Amounts as a temporary overlay on the existing system under Section 951. See IRC

§ 965(a) (Subpart F income, as otherwise determined, “shall be increased by” accumulated post-

1986 deferred foreign income). For tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2018, Section 951

continues to require annual inclusion of subpart F deemed dividends, like those at issue in Oracle

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II. See id. at ¶ A1.06[6] (“In the past, Section 951 has been the section that forces the U.S.

shareholders of controlled foreign corporations to include certain amounts in income. Section

951 continues in that role.”).

As a provision affecting federal gross and taxable income, the repatriation requirement

automatically was incorporated into Oregon law, but CFC shareholders that were themselves

corporations holding at least 20 percent of the stock of a CFC benefitted from Oregon’s

“dividends-received” subtraction, by which they subtracted 80 percent of the Federal

Repatriation Amount in computing Oregon taxable income. See ORS 317.010(7)(b), (8), (10)

(incorporating “taxable income,” under federal law as in effect for taxpayer’s tax year, as starting

point in computing “Oregon taxable income”); ORS 317.070 (imposing tax according to

“Oregon taxable income”); ORS 317.267(2)(b) (requiring subtraction, in computing Oregon

taxable income, for certain dividends received). Other transitional provisions, including the

TCJA rate reduction and the extended deadlines to pay, were not automatically incorporated and

thus did not apply for Oregon purposes. See, e.g., ORS 317.061 (setting rates without mention of

federal law).

III. ISSUES

A. Must a “deemed dividend” constituting the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount be
“reincluded” in the definition of “sales” under ORS 314.665(6)(a) if the deemed payor is
a CFC engaged in a unitary business with the taxpayer, and if the taxpayer’s primary
business activity is the same as that of the CFC?

B. Has Plaintiff carried its burden of proving that the assessment fails to “fairly represent the
extent of the taxpayer’s business activity in this state” or that the assessment produces
“unconstitutional results”?

IV. FACTS; TABLES SHOWING PARTIES’ COMPUTATIONS

Plaintiff is a Washington corporation with its primary place of business in Redmond,

Washington. (Stip Facts at 2, ¶ 1.) At relevant times, Plaintiff has operated on a fiscal year

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
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ending June 30, which corresponds to its tax year for federal and Oregon income tax purposes.

(See id. at 3, ¶ 8.)

Plaintiff and its domestic and foreign subsidiaries (the Worldwide Group) have been, at

all relevant times, a unitary group conducting a unitary business that principally develops,

manufactures, markets, distributes, sells, licenses, and supports a wide range of software and

hardware products, devices, and services. (Id. at 2, ¶ 2.) Members of the group consisting of

Plaintiff and some or all of its domestic subsidiaries (the Water’s-Edge Group) own foreign

subsidiaries, including CFCs that license, manufacture, and distribute Microsoft-branded

products outside the United States. (Id. at 2, ¶ 3.)

Defendant does not assert that any addition to the numerator of the apportionment

fraction is necessary in this case. (See Statement of Darren Weirnick, Oral Argument, Apr 4,

2023, 2:08 (“The sales of the CFCs * * * those are sales in foreign jurisdictions * * * and I don’t

think there’s any dispute about that.”).)

As of TYE 2018, Plaintiff reported in its 10-K that the Worldwide Group employed

approximately 131,000 people on a full-time basis. Some 78,000 were in the United States

(including 155 in Oregon), and some 53,000 were outside the United States. (Id. at 2, ¶¶ 4-5.)

The reported domestic and foreign sales of the Worldwide Group were $55,926,000,000 in the

United States and $54,434,000,000 from other countries. (Id. at 2, ¶ 6.)

As of June 30, 2017, Plaintiff reported in its Form 10-K that $142,000,000,000 of foreign

earnings and profits of the foreign subsidiaries in the Worldwide Group were permanently

reinvested outside of the United States. (Id. at 2-3, ¶ 7.)

After the passage on December 22, 2017, of the TCJA, which among other things

amended IRC § 965, Defendant issued Oregon Revenue Bulletin 2018-01. (Id. at 3, ¶ 9.) The

Bulletin states in part: “[T]he [[Federal] {20 Percent} Repatriation Amount] {must

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
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be}[is]excluded from the sales factor for tax years beginning [on or after]{before} January 1,

2018{, unless the repatriation gross receipts are derived from the taxpayer’s primary

business activity}.” (Stip Ex 20 at 1.)

In May 2019, the Water’s-Edge Group timely filed consolidated federal and Oregon

returns for TYE 2018. (See Stip Facts at 2-4.)

• The federal return reported a Federal Repatriation Amount under IRC § 965(a) of
$159,380,563,499, which included current foreign earnings and profits and those
accumulated since the early 2000s. (See id. at 3, ¶ 11.)

• The Oregon return reported total taxable business income of $42,350,143,724, which
included a 20 Percent Repatriation Amount of $31,876,112,700, after applying the 80-
percent dividend received subtraction under ORS 317.267(2). (See id. at 3-4, ¶ 13.)

• Consistent with the Bulletin, the Oregon sales factor on the return (0.5318 percent) did
not include any receipts attributable to the Federal Repatriation Amount or other subpart
F income. (See id. at 4, ¶13.)

• The amount of Oregon tax shown on the return was $16,977,966; this was timely paid.
(See id. at 4, ¶ 13.)

On or about May 20, 2019, shortly after filing its original Oregon return, the Water’s-

Edge Group filed an amended return for TYE 2018 based on use of alternative apportionment

under ORS 314.667. (See id. at 4, ¶ 14.) The following “proforma amended return” table is an

excerpt from that filing:

//

//

//

//

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Table 1. Amounts of Tax Paid and Refund Claimed on Amended Return
Amended
Assessment 10 Refund Claim 11 Amounts 12
Pre Apportioned $42,350,143,724 $42,350,143,724
Income
Apportionment 0.5318% (0.3432%) 0.1886%
Taxable Income $225,218,064 $79,884,823
Regular Tax $17,106,573 ($11,045,326) $6,061,247
Research Credit ($128,607) $128,607
Net Tax $16,977,966 ($11,045,326) $5,932,640

(Stip Ex 24 at 2.) The amended return thus claims a refund of $11,045,326, leaving an

undisputed Oregon tax amount of approximately $6 million.13 (See id.) In computing the refund

claim, Plaintiff added the Federal Repatriation Amount to the sales factor denominator. (See Stip

Ex 24 at 1 (“In our petition, we sought to include the foreign dividends in the sales factor.”).)

On June 1, 2020, Defendant issued a letter denying the request for refund, and Defendant

directed Plaintiff to “[c]onsider this document your Notice of Proposed Refund Adjustment.”

(Stip Ex 25 at 7.) Defendant acknowledges that Plaintiff timely appealed to the Magistrate

Division. (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp at 9 (“Microsoft timely appealed the department’s

notice to the Magistrate Division.”).) The court specially designated the matter for hearing in the

Regular Division at the parties’ joint request, and Plaintiff thereafter filed its amended complaint,

which Defendant has answered.

Various other administrative proceedings have occurred with respect to TYE 2018,

including:

10
Labeled “Original Return” on Stip Ex 24.
11
Labeled “Difference” on Stip Ex 24.
12
Labeled “Corrected” on Stip Ex 24.
13
The court ignores Plaintiff’s claim for a research and development credit, as the parties have not
discussed that credit in briefing.

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• Plaintiff’s filing of a pre-return petition for alternative apportionment under ORS 314.667
in January 2019, which Defendant apparently treats as having been amended by the May
20, 2019 refund claim and denied in Defendant’s June 1, 2020, letter;

• Defendant’s post-return audit of TYE 2018 and other tax years that resulted in a
deficiency notice followed by conference proceedings, all culminating in relatively minor
adjustments, in November 2021, to the amount at issue for TYE 2018; and

• The filing, in December 2021, of a second amended Oregon return for TYE 2018 based
on amendments to the consolidated federal return.

(See Stip Facts at 3-7; Stip Ex 25 at 1 (June 1, 2020 letter from Defendant, referring to Plaintiff’s

“refund claim and amended request for alternative apportionment”)); (see also Def’s Cross-Mot

Summ J & Resp at 7 (referring to May 20, 2019, refund claim as “the superseding request for

alternative apportionment”).) The record suggests that at least some of these proceedings may

result in adjustments to the amounts shown on the original return and commensurate adjustments

to the amount of refund Plaintiff seeks under its legal theories and proposals for alternative

apportionment. See, e.g., footnotes to Tables 2 and 3, below. The court finds that any such

adjustments do not, however, raise a genuine issue of material fact that would preclude summary

judgment. The court will rule on the parties’ cross-motions and will direct the parties to seek

resolution of any computational issues, with further proceedings to follow if necessary.

{For convenience, the court includes additional information regarding the amount of

refund in dispute under each of the positions advanced by Plaintiff to be discussed in this

Order. At oral argument the parties provided approximations of the amount of the refund

that would be due if the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount were included in the sales

denominator. Plaintiff estimates that the refund due under reinclusion would be

approximately $5,400,000. (Statement of Robert Mitchell, Oral Argument, Apr 4, 2023, at

1:10.) Defendant estimates that the refund would be approximately $4,600,000. (Statement

of Darren Weirnick, Oral Argument, Apr 4, 2023, at 1:44.) The difference between the

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
SUMMARY JUDGMENT TC 5413 Page 16 of 63
parties appears to turn on resolution of computational issues mentioned in the previous

paragraph, which are not material to resolving the issues raised in the parties’ cross-

motions for summary judgment.}[For convenience, the court adds the following table showing

the parties’ differing computations of the effect of reinclusion of the 20 Percent Repatriation

Amount in the denominator of the sales factor pursuant to ORS 314.665(6)(a).]

Table 2. Issue A: Parties’ Computations of Reduction to Refund Claim if 20 Percent
Repatriation Amount is Reincluded under ORS 314.665(6)(a)
Refund Claim Per Refund Due Remaining
Amended Return Under Reinclusion Refund
Sought
14 15
Plaintiff $11,045,326 $5,400,000 $5,645,326
Defendant $11,045,326 16 $4,600,000 17 $6,445,326

For comparison with the amounts of the assessment, the refund claim, and the refund due under

reinclusion, the following table shows the respective amounts Plaintiff argues would be due

under its three proposals for alternative apportionment.

14
(Stip Ex 24 at 2.)
15
(Statement of Robert Mitchell, Oral Argument, Apr 4, 2023, 1:10)
16
(Stip Ex 24 at 2.)
17
(Statement of Darren Weirnick, Oral Argument, Apr 4, 2023, 1:44)

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Table 3. Issue B: Plaintiff’s Estimates of Refund Due Under Plaintiff’s Alternative
Apportionment Proposals 18
Proposal 1 19 Proposal 2 20 Proposal 3 21
Include 20% of CFC Sales Include 100% of Federal Separate Accounting
in Denominator Repatriation Amount in
Denominator
Amount Added to
Denominator $106,892,100,683 $157,052,683,170 N/A
Apportionment
Percentage
(0.4924% in
Assessment) 0.2313% 0.1852% N/A
Refund Due $9,670,618 $11,242,112 $13,268,040

V. ANALYSIS

A. Plaintiff’s First Theory: Reinclusion of Deemed Dividends Under ORS 314.665(6)(a)

Plaintiff argues that it is entitled to a portion of the refund it seeks as a matter of statutory

construction, not depending on any alleged unfairness or unconstitutionality. Plaintiff’s position

is that the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount should be reincluded in the denominator of the

Oregon sales factor under ORS 314.665(6)(a) as construed in Oracle II. Defendant argues that

the portion of Oracle II on which Plaintiff relies was wrongly decided, and that the Federal

Repatriation Amount was derived from holding stock in the CFCs, not from the primary business

18
Defendant has not provided a calculation of the refund due under proposal 1 but has noted a dispute with
Plaintiff’s calculation. (Statement of Darren Weirnick, Oral Argument, Apr 4, 2023, 1:46). Under proposal 2,
Defendant calculates that Plaintiff would be due a refund of $10,961,160. (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp App C
at 78). Under proposal 3, Defendant calculates Plaintiff’s refund would be $12,846,530. (Id.).

Defendant identifies three independent reasons for the discrepancies between Plaintiff’s and Defendant’s
refund estimates, which apply regardless of the apportionment methodology: “First, Microsoft’s sales denominator
is incorrect and inconsistent with the parties’ stipulation. * * * Second, Microsoft’s computation of Oregon tax
before credits under each of its proposed alternative methods applies the 7.6-percent tax rate to the Water’s Edge
Group’s entire Oregon taxable income, which fails to take into account that the 6.6-percent tax bracket applies to the
first $1M of Oregon taxable income. * * * Third * * * Microsoft’s computations neglect to take into account that as
a result of the conference decision for TYE 2018 issued in 2021, the department adjusted Microsoft’s corporation
excise tax for TYE 2018 downwards, as shown in a corrected notice of adjustment of $121,247 for that year.”
(Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp App C at 76).
19
(Ptf’s Memo Further Supp Mot Summ J App B at 33-34.)
20
(Ptf’s Memo Supp Mot Summ J at 24-25.)
21
(Ptf’s Memo Supp Mot Summ J at 26.)

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activity of Plaintiff or the Water’s-Edge Group. 22 (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp at 16-21.)

The court restates and further explains its reasoning in Oracle II and concludes that Plaintiff

prevails on its first theory.

The text of ORS 314.665(6) is the same text that applied to the tax years at issue in

Oracle II: 23

“(6) For purposes of this section, ‘sales’:

“(a) Excludes gross receipts arising from the sale, exchange, redemption or
holding of intangible assets, including but not limited to securities, unless those
receipts are derived from the taxpayer’s primary business activity.

“(b) Includes net gain from the sale, exchange or redemption of intangible assets
not derived from the primary business activity of the taxpayer but included in the
taxpayer’s business income.

“(c) Excludes gross receipts arising from an incidental or occasional sale of a
fixed asset or assets used in the regular course of the taxpayer’s trade or business
if a substantial amount of the gross receipts of the taxpayer arise from an
incidental or occasional sale or sales of fixed assets used in the regular course of
the taxpayer’s trade or business. Insubstantial amounts of gross receipts arising
from incidental or occasional transactions or activities may be excluded from the
sales factor unless the exclusion would materially affect the amount of income
apportioned to this state.”

(Emphasis added.) Based on the text and context of subsection (a) of ORS 314.665, this court in

Oracle II held that deemed dividends under subpart F are eligible to be treated as “derived from

the taxpayer’s primary business activity” if the taxpayer is a water’s- edge group that is engaged

in a single unitary business with its CFCs. Oracle II, 24 OTR at 386-95 & n 32.

22
Defendant also argues that Oracle II is not precedential because the plaintiff in that case dismissed its
appeal after the court’s order on partial summary judgment but before all issues had been decided. (Def’s Cross-
Mot Summ J & Resp at 17 n 18 (citing State v. Cigtec Tobacco, LLC, 200 Or App 501, 504, 115 P3d 978 (2005).)
The court in this case does not rely on Oracle II as precedent but refers to it only for its persuasive value.
23
Oracle II involved tax years ending May 31, 2010, 2011, and 2012. See Oracle II, 24 OTR at 360 & n 3
(citing 2009 edition of ORS). The 2017 legislature substantially changed Oregon’s apportionment laws, generally
replacing the sourcing provisions for sales other than sales of tangible personal property and adopting a market-
based approach. In the process, the legislature eliminated ORS 314.665(6). However, those changes applied to tax
years beginning on or after January 1, 2018, and thus do not apply to TYE 2018. See Or Laws 2017 ch 43, §§ 5, 12;
Or Laws 2017 ch 549, §§ 3, 5; Or Laws 2017 ch 622, §§ 3, 5.

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1. Comparison with Tektronix

Defendant argues in this case that the reasoning in Oracle II conflicts with that of the

Supreme Court in Tektronix, Inc. v. Department of Revenue, 354 Or 531, 316 P3d 276 (2013).

(Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp at 15-16). According to Defendant, CFC income is “derived

from” the holding of CFC stock, which is not the taxpayer’s primary business activity. (Id. at

15). The court finds Tektronix distinguishable.

In Tektronix, the taxpayer, an electronics manufacturer, sold assets constituting its printer

division to Xerox Corporation, and a sizeable portion of the sale price was attributable to

“goodwill.” See Tektronix, Inc. v. Dept. of Rev., 20 OTR 468, 469 (2012), aff’d on other

grounds 354 Or 531, 316 P3d 276 (2013). The taxpayer took the position that the gain was

excluded from “sales” because it “ar[ose] from the sale * * * of intangible assets” under

ORS 314.665(6)(a). 24 See 354 Or at 542. Defendant assessed a deficiency, contending that that

portion must be reincluded because the goodwill

“was developed by [taxpayer] over many years, in the operation of its Color
Printing Division. * * * [T]he Color Printing Division was central to [taxpayer’s]
primary business of manufacturing and distributing electronics products.”

Id. at 547 (internal quotations omitted). In response, the taxpayer

“contend[ed] that, because it did not receive the $590 million from the
manufacture and sale of electronics equipment, the $590 million did not ‘derive[ ]
from the taxpayer’s primary business activity.’”

Id. The Supreme Court squarely agreed with the taxpayer, rejecting Defendant’s position

because Defendant had

“represented to the Tax Court that taxpayer’s ‘primary business’ was
‘manufacturing and distributing electronics products.’ The sale at issue here was
not the sale of such products, but the sale of an entire division of taxpayer’s
business. The department did not adduce any evidence that taxpayer’s primary
24
The positions of the parties in Tektronix were the reverse of those in this case. Presumably, the taxpayer
in Tektronix sought to exclude the gain from the definition of “sales” because some or all of the gain would have
been sourced to Oregon and included in the numerator of the sales factor.

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business was engaging in the sale of its divisions, and there is no basis for
concluding otherwise.”

Id. at 547-48.

In contrast to the gain in Tektronix from the “sale of an entire division,” in this case most

if not all of the Federal Repatriation Amount demonstrably consists of earnings and profits

[from]{the CFCs earned by working together with the Water’s-Edge Group to}sell[ing] the

same goods and services normally sold in Plaintiff’s software business. See IRC § 965(a)

(Federal Repatriation Amount consists of “accumulated post-1986 deferred foreign income” of

CFC); IRC § 965(d)(2) (defining “accumulated post-1986 deferred foreign income” as “CFC’s

post-1986 earnings and profits,” with exceptions). “Earnings and profits” is a term of art in

federal income tax law, but its starting point is taxable income. See Boris I. Bittker & Lawrence

Lokken, Federal Taxation of Income, Estates and Gifts ¶ 92.1.3. (“Earnings and profits are

usually computed starting from taxable income.”). There is no dispute that “many of the CFCs

in turn engaged in similar ‘primary’ business activities abroad as the Water’s-Edge Group

engaged in domestically.” (Def’s Reply at 3.) And the sales activities of the Water’s-Edge

Group and the CFCs were not only of the same type, they were part of the same business. The

Water’s-Edge Group and the CFCs were actively engaged together in the same single, “unitary

business” that generated those earnings and profits. (See Stip Facts ¶ 2.) By definition, there

was a “sharing or exchange of value” among all of the corporations in the Worldwide Group, as

demonstrated by “centralized management,” “centralized administrative services” resulting in

“economies of scale,” or a flow of goods or other resources demonstrating “functional

integration.” See ORS 317.705(3) (1993) (definition of “unitary business”). The only reason

those earnings and profits had not already been included in the federal taxable income of the

Water’s-Edge Group before TYE 2018 was that Congress had not yet required the amounts to be

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added to subpart F income, and the directors of the CFCs (presumably elected by members of the

Water’s-Edge Group) had not chosen to pay out the amounts as dividends.

{The goodwill in Tektronix was a step removed from earnings and profits from sales

to customers in the course of the unitary business. This is apparent from the way the two

amounts are determined. The Federal Repatriation Amount was determined by adding up

many years’ worth of undistributed earnings and profits from selling software and services

to customers, then attributing that accumulated amount to the Water’s-Edge Group. By

contrast, the amount of the gross receipts at issue in Tektronix was determined solely by

whatever Xerox Corporation was willing to pay for an entire package of assets comprising

the printer division as a whole. The amount assigned to goodwill in that transaction was

residual: the “amount paid by [Xerox] in excess of the aggregate fair market value of other

assets purchased.” 20 OTR at 504 (citing Webster’s Third New International Dictionary at

979 (2002) (defining “goodwill” as “the excess of the purchase price of a business over and

above the value assigned to its net assets exclusive of goodwill”). The amount paid for

goodwill, therefore, determined by the circumstances of the one-off sale of Tektronix’s

printer division, did not necessarily bear any relationship to the amount of prior earnings

or profits from engaging in the unitary business.}

The distinction in this case, then, is that there is no intervening activity, such as the sale

in Tektronix, that separates the business activities of the CFCs that generated the earnings and

profits that became the Federal Repatriation Amount from the business activities of the Water’s-

Edge Group. 25 The court sees nothing in Tektronix that changes the reasoning in Oracle II.

2. Reasoning of Oracle II

25
This is literally true in this particular case, as in Oracle II, because subpart F caused the income to be
included by operation of law without even the declaration of a dividend.

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The court briefly expands on its interpretation of “primary business activity” in Oracle II,

applying the framework of State v. Gaines, 346 Or 160, 171, 206 P 3d 1042 (2009):

• Text. The reinclusion clause “does not say that the amount must be reincluded if
the sale, exchange, redemption or holding of the intangibles constitutes the
taxpayer’s primary business activity.” Oracle II, 24 OTR at 394 (emphases in
original). Instead, the text leaves open the possibility that gross receipts may be
derived from the taxpayer’s primary business activity, regardless of whether they
arise from the sale, exchange, redemption or holding of intangible assets.

• Context.
o Administrative rule on “income producing activity.” As of 1995, a
longstanding rule of Defendant declared: “The mere holding of intangible
personal property is not, of itself, an income producing activity.” OAR
150-314.665(3)(2) (1994); see Oracle II, 24 OTR at 391-94. The purpose
of the rule was relevant: to “determine[ ] whether dividends and other
receipts from intangibles or services are assigned to the numerator of the
sales factor and thus increase the percentage of income that Oregon may
tax.” Oracle II, 24 OTR at 392 (referring to ORS 314.665(4) (1993)).
The legislature is deemed to have been aware of this rule, and that
awareness makes it less likely that the legislature intended “primary
business activity” to include the holding of stock and the receipt of
dividends (actual or deemed). See First EUB Church v. Commission, 1
OTR 249, 260-61 (1963). 26

26
{Defendant argues that another portion of OAR 150-314-0435, renumbered from OAR 150-314.665 in
2016, prohibits inclusion of the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount in the denominator independently of the
reinclusion provision in ORS 314.665(6)(a). (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J at 19-20.) In considering this
argument, the court first notes that the rule was the subject of considerable analysis in AT&T Corp. v. Dept.
of Rev., 357 Or 691, 358 P3d 973 (2015). However, in that case the rule was incorporated as a rule under
ORS 314.280, which expressly delegates broad rulemaking authority to Defendant for the apportionment and
allocation of income of a “public utility,” including one engaged in “the transmission of communications.”
See id. at 702 & nn 7-9 (referring to former OAR 150-314.665). No such express delegation applies to the rule
as applied to non-public utilities that are subject to UDITPA, including Plaintiff in this case. Nonetheless, in
this case as in AT&T, neither party contests the validity of the rule; therefore, the court construes it as
guidance. See AT&T at 709-10 (“Neither party asserts that the department’s rule is invalid or inconsistent
with ORS 314.665(4). Accordingly, we now turn to that rule for guidance.”).

Defendant relies mainly on a sourcing provision and example in OAR 150-314-0435(3)(b) (emphases
added):

“(b) Where business income from intangible property cannot readily be attributed to any particular income
producing activity of the taxpayer, the income cannot be assigned to the numerator of the sales factor for
any state and must be excluded from the denominator of the sales factor. For example, where business
income in the form of dividends received on stock, royalties received on patents or copyrights, or interest
received on bonds, debentures or government securities results from the mere holding of the intangible
personal property by the taxpayer, the dividends and interest must be excluded from the denominator of
the sales factor.”

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Defendant seems to make two arguments under the rule; the court disagrees with each one. First, one of
the rule provisions that Defendant highlights in its briefing is the example in the second sentence quoted
above. (See Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J at 19.) But to the extent that Defendant reads the example to require
exclusion per se of dividends that are business income, Defendant’s reading is incorrect. The example
requires per se exclusion only for business-income dividends that “result[ ] from the mere holding” of the
stock. A parent company and its domestic affiliates that are engaged in a single unitary business with foreign
subsidiaries that are CFCs do not “mere[ly] hold[ ]” the CFC stock. Instead, by definition, the domestic
parent centrally and actively manages the business through its domestic and foreign subsidiaries as one
functionally integrated enterprise. See ORS 317.705(3) (defining unitary business). Because actual and
deemed dividends from unitary CFCs are not automatically excluded from the denominator, they are sourced
based on the location of the greater proportion of the costs of performing the income-producing activities that
“give[ ] rise to the particular item of income.” OAR 150-314-0435(4). This inquiry is factual, and the rule
requires the dividends to be excluded only if the income-producing activity that causes them cannot readily
be identified.

This brings us to Defendant’s second argument: that the 20 Percent Deemed Repatriation Amount
cannot readily be attributed to a particular income-producing activity of the Water’s-Edge Group. (See Def’s
Cross-Mot Summ J at 19-20.) The problem with this argument is that Defendant has not made a prima facie
case. For starters, Defendant has not attempted to identify the kinds of activities that “give rise” to a
dividend that is not only business income but business income from a unitary subsidiary. Citing Tektronix,
Defendant provides only the conclusory statement that “[t]he deemed distribution of the accumulated of
earnings and profits of CFCs, particularly over nearly two decades is, like goodwill, the product of many
activities over many years, unlike the provision of a particular service to a customer.” (Def’s Cross-Mot
Summ J at 19.) The court believes that even the “readily * * * attributed” standard in the rule requires a
deeper inquiry. For example, cogent arguments could be made that the court should focus on one or both of
the following:

• Activities of the Water’s-Edge Group as shareholders, affecting whether or when the CFCs
would pay dividends, or be deemed to pay them. For example, as majority shareholders of the
CFCs, members of the Water’s-Edge Group, acting through employees or board members whose
compensation costs were borne by the Water’s-Edge Group, could have used their voting power
to control or influence decisions of the CFCs to either declare actual dividends that would be
immediately subject to United States federal and state tax in tax years before the TCJA, or to
refrain from declaring dividends such that earnings and profits would build up and be included
in the Deemed Repatriation Amount. A focus on this first type of activity would harmonize the
rule’s requirement that the income-producing activity “give rise” to the dividend or deemed
dividend with the court’s reasoning in Oracle II that gross receipts under Section 965 “arise
from” dividends or deemed dividends. See Oracle II, 24 OTR at 386-88; Tektronix, 354 Or 531.

• The second alternative type of activity consists of the activities of the Water’s-Edge Group that
assisted in generating the CFCs’ earnings and profits. Defendant argues that “[o]ne may not
conflate the activity of the CFCs with the activity of the taxpayer, the Water’s-Edge Group,
under ORS 314.665(4).” (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J at 20.) That statement is true in the abstract,
but it again ignores the fact that the Water’s-Edge Group and the CFCs were engaged together
in the same “unitary business,” which necessarily means that their activities were centralized
and integrated. See ORS 317.705(3) (defining unitary business). For example, supervision of
enterprise-wide business functions such as developing or updating products, branding, and
marketing might be readily identifiable, and the associated costs of performance might be
traceable and attributable to particular locations.

The record before the court does not make a prima facie showing that activities of either type cannot be
readily identified, or that the court should consider some other type of activity. What the record does show is

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
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that 45,276 of Plaintiff’s full-time-equivalent employees in TYE 2018 were located in the state of Washington,
compared to 78,000 in the United States and 131,000 worldwide. (Def’s Decl of Kelley at 1, ¶ 2; Stip Facts at
2, ¶ 4.) Washington also was the state of Plaintiff’s primary place of business (Stip Facts at 2, ¶ 1) and of its
commercial domicile (Ptf’s Mot Summ J at 2; Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J at 2.) Defendant itself, in its briefing
on Plaintiff’s motion for reconsideration, seems to assume that, whatever the relevant activities were, they
happened in Washington. (See Def’s Resp Recons at 3 (“if the income-producing activity that produced the
20 Percent Repatriation [Amount] is the activity of a member of the affiliated group in some water’s-edge
jurisdiction, that activity would be attributed to only one state--here, the headquarters state from which
Microsoft oversees or manages the CFCs.”).) Thus, without opining on the level of deference to be afforded
to the rule as applied to a UDITPA taxpayer, or on the overall validity of the “throw-out” provision in the
rule, the court rejects Defendant’s argument that application of the rule to the facts of this case requires the
20 Percent Repatriation Amount to be excluded from the denominator.

Separately from the rule, Defendant contends that including the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount in the
sales factor denominator is inherently unconstitutionally distortive if the entire 20 Percent Repatriation
Amount is then included in the numerator for any one state. (See, e.g., Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J at 23-24
(“the sudden recognition in the sales factor in a single year of decades of deferred earnings and profits would
not be representative of the taxpayer’s ordinary business activity in TYE 2018 * * * .”).) The court rejects
this contention, again because the great majority of Water’s-Edge Group employees were located in
Washington and because the nature of those employees’ work apparently was such that Plaintiff’s
“commercial domicile” was in Washington. On that record, the court cannot rule that sourcing the 20
Percent Repatriation Amount to Washington inherently fails to “actually reflect a reasonable sense of how
[the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount] is generated.” Container Corp., 463 US at 169.}

[Defendant argues that other portions of the rule prohibit reinclusion of the gross receipts in this case. (Def’s
Cross-Mot Summ J at 19.) First, Defendant claims that the activities that gave rise to the CFCs’ earnings and
profits were not “directly engaged in by the taxpayer” as required by OAR 150-314.665(2)-(B)(2) (1995). This
argument fails for the reason explained above: under the definition of a “unitary business,” Plaintiff and the
Water’s-Edge Group were inextricably involved in the same business as the CFCs.

Second, according to Defendant, the receipts in this case “cannot readily be attributed to any particular income
producing activity of the taxpayer” and must therefore be excluded from both the numerator and the denominator of
the sales factor under OAR 150-314.665(3)(b). The court rejects this argument for the same reason: as to most of
the CFCs, if not all of them, the income producing activities were the same as those engaged in by the Water’s-Edge
Group. The example in the second sentence of subsection (3)(b) makes it clear that the inability to readily attribute
income to an activity arises when the income “results from the mere holding of the intangible personal property by
the taxpayer,” as would occur, for example, when the taxpayer owns a minority interest in the stock and is not
engaged in a unitary business with the subsidiary.

On a similar note, Defendant seeks to equate the CFCs’ accumulated earnings and profits in this case with the
goodwill in Tektronix which, this court stated, “reflected an accumulation of value over periods of time * * *.”
Tektronix, 20 OTR at 471. (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp at 20.) This court concluded that the gain in
Tektronix was not readily attributable to a particular income-producing activity under the rule, and Defendant seeks
the same result here. However, Defendant compares apples to oranges. The Federal Repatriation Amount consists
of the CFCs’ accumulated “earnings and profits.” Federal tax accounting rules require the earnings and profits of
a corporation to be determined with substantial precision and tracked over time, because a distribution to
shareholders--whenever it might happen--constitutes dividend income only to the extent that the corporation makes
the distribution “out of its earnings and profits.” IRC § 316(a); see Bittker & Lokken ¶ 92.1.3 (“Because there is
no statute of limitations on the effect of prior transactions on accumulated earnings and profits, permanent retention
of corporate records is advisable.”) (footnote omitted). The record in this case suggests that Plaintiff was readily
able to make those calculations, thus attributing the 20 Percent Repatriation Amount to the activities of the CFCs in
the course of their trade or business, which they engaged in together with the Water’s-Edge Group. By contrast, the
amount of gross receipts at issue in Tektronix was determined solely by whatever Xerox Corporation was willing to
pay for the intangibles at issue. To the extent that the intangibles were goodwill, their value was the residual
“amount paid by [the] purchaser in excess of the aggregate fair market value of other assets purchased.” 24 OTR

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
SUMMARY JUDGMENT TC 5413 Page 25 of 63
o Mobil. Some 15 years before the 1995 legislative session, the United
States Supreme Court relied on the unitary nature of a business conducted
by a domestic parent corporation and its overseas subsidiaries in allowing
Vermont to tax an apportioned share of dividends from those subsidiaries.
Mobil Oil Corp. v. Commissioner of Taxes, 445 US 425, 100 S Ct 1223, 63
L Ed 2d 510 (1980). At the time, Vermont law did not allow the parent
corporation to file a combined report or a consolidated return with its
subsidiaries; therefore, dividends to the parent were not “eliminated” as
intercompany transactions. See Mobil, 445 US at 441 n 15. The taxpayer
sought to treat the dividends as nonapportionable nonbusiness income
allocated outside Vermont. See Mobil, 445 US at 430. However, the
Court held that the dividends were business income to the extent received
from affiliates engaged in a unitary business with the taxpayer:
“So long as dividends from subsidiaries and affiliates reflect
profits derived from a functionally integrated enterprise, those
dividends are income to the parent earned in a unitary business.
One must look principally at the underlying activity, not the form
of investment, to determine the propriety of apportionability.

“Superficially, intercorporate division might appear to be a more
attractive basis for limiting apportionability. But the form of
business organization may have nothing to do with the underlying
unity or diversity of business enterprise. Had appellant chosen to
operate its foreign subsidiaries as separate divisions of a legally as
well as a functionally integrated enterprise, there is little doubt that
the income derived from those divisions would meet due process
requirements for apportionability.”

Id. at 440-41. The Oregon Legislature would have understood from Mobil that it
is the “underlying activity” that determines whether dividends are apportionable
at all, and that when the parent and subsidiary share the same activities because
they engage together in the same unitary business, the dividends are
apportionable. 27 The court sees no reason why the legislature would have
deviated from that understanding when it used the term “primary business

at 504. That value did not necessarily bear any relationship to the amount of prior earnings or income, so it is
unsurprising that the gross receipts from the sale of the intangibles in Tektronix could not be readily attributed to a
particular business activity.]
27
The court expresses no view as to whether it would reach the same conclusion if Plaintiff and the CFCs
were not engaged in a single unitary business. The court also takes this opportunity to correct a mislabeling in
Oracle II: scholars sometimes describe entities engaged together in a single unitary business as having “enterprise
unity.” See, e.g., Jerome R. Hellerstein & Walter Hellerstein, State Taxation: Third Edition ¶ 8.08[2][b][i] 6-7 (Jul
2024). In Oracle II, the court incorrectly described that kind of relationship (present in Mobil, in Oracle II, and in
this case) as “asset unity.” Oracle II, 24 OTR at 395 n 38; see Comcast; Hellerstein et al., State Taxation at ¶ 8.08.

{AMENDED} ORDER ON CROSS-MOTIONS FOR
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activity” to determine whether dividends from a unitary subsidiary are reincluded
as gross receipts. 28

• Legislative history. As the Supreme Court explained in Tektronix, the legislature
adopted ORS 314.665(6)(a) as a “broader solution” to the relatively discrete
“‘treasury function’ problem,” referring to the sourcing of gross receipts from
stock or other intangibles that are “short-term liquid assets that a corporation
use[s] to store cash for business purposes.” Tektronix, 354 Or at 545. Subpart F
income plainly is not part of the treasury function problem, because there is no
evidence that Plaintiff held the CFCs as short-term vessels to store cash. But
there also is no discussion in the legislative history to suggest that subpart F
income is within the scope of the broader solution.
As in Oracle II, the court concludes that, in the case of a multicorporate unitary business,

the 1995 Oregon Legislative Assembly (“legislature”) intended “primary business activity” to be

determined by reference to “underlying activities” (in this case, developing, manufacturing,

marketing, distributing, selling, licensing, and supporting a wide range of software and hardware

products, devices, and services), not to “[s]uperficial[ ]” activities related only to “intercorporate

28
Defendant argues that this conclusion “would disregard the separate personhood of the foreign
corporations and the legislature’s deliberate decision in the 1984 special session to end Oregon’s use of worldwide
combined reporting effective in 1986 and to move to a water’s-edge method based on the federal consolidated return
filed by domestic corporations included in a federal affiliated group.” (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp at 14-15.)
The court disagrees with both points.

First, simply acknowledging the fact that Water’s Edge Group members, as majority shareholders of the
CFCs, no doubt can often influence the CFCs’ directors they appoint to declare dividends, or to refrain from doing
so in a manner that causes CFC earnings and profits to build up over time without taxation, does not disregard the
separate existence of the CFCs. See Moline Prop., Inc., v. Com’r of Internal Rev., 319 US 436, 439, 63 S Ct 1132,
87 L Ed 1499 (1943) (stating “* * * so long as th[e] purpose is the equivalent of business activity or is followed by
the carrying on of business by the corporation, the corporation remains a separate taxable entity”).

Second, the line drawn by the 1984 legislature is analogous to that in Mobil: both Oregon’s water’s-edge
system and Vermont’s separate-return system require dividends to be recognized as income, rather than eliminated
as intercompany items. Yet in determining how to treat such dividends for apportionment purposes, the court in
Mobil looked beyond Vermont’s line to the unitary nature of the business conducted by affiliates on both sides of the
line. Moreover, the Court’s recent decision in Moore similarly reaches beyond the domestic-foreign divide by
concluding that a CFC’s realization of income in the course of the CFC’s business suffices to satisfy any
requirement that income be “realized” in order for the inclusion of the Federal Repatriation Amount in subpart F
income to survive scrutiny as an “income” tax under the Taxing Clause, the Direct Tax Clause, and the Sixteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution. See Moore, 219 L Ed 2d at 288 (inclusion of Federal Repatriation
Amount in subpart F “does tax realized income--namely, income realized by the [CFC].”) (emphasis in original); id.
at 291 n 3 (“The Government argues that a gain does not need to be realized to constitute income under the
Constitution. * * * Because the [inclusion of the Federal Repatriation Amount as subpart F income] taxes realized
income--namely, income realized by the corporation and attributed to the shareholders--we do not address the
Government’s argument that a gain need not be realized to constitute income under the Constitution.”).

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division,” such as forming subsidiaries and holding their stock. (Stip Facts at ¶ 2.) Mobil, 445

US at 440. Therefore, Plaintiff prevails as to its first theory, to the following extent:

“The two things that must be compared under the reinclusion provision are,
therefore, (1) the primary business activity of the subsidiary that generated the
earnings and profits * * * to which any subpart F income is attributable * * * and
(2) the primary business activity of the parent. If these are the same, then the
dividend must be reincluded in the definition of ‘sales’ because the * * * subpart
F income * * * is ‘derived from’ the taxpayer parent’s ‘primary business
activity.’”

Oracle II, 24 OTR at 395. 29

B. Plaintiff’s Second Theory: Factor Representation

The court’s conclusion in Plaintiff’s favor on the reinclusion issue does not result in a

refund of the full amount Plaintiff claims. See Table 2, Part IV, above. As its second theory,

Plaintiff argues that, regardless of whether it prevails under its first theory, it is entitled to deviate

from Oregon’s statutory apportionment formula under the “safety valve” statute in Oregon’s

UDITPA (ORS 314.667). (Ptf’s Memo Further Supp Mot Summ J at 10 (“If DOR is wrong, and

the statute is read to authorize representation of the deemed dividend in the sales factor, the

constitutional issues that this case raises can be ameliorated (though not fully resolved).”)

(emphasis added).) 30 Commenters and practitioners commonly refer to Plaintiff’s position as a

request for “factor representation” or “factor relief,” which relies on a principle of correlation:

29
Defendant “does not dispute that most of the CFCs appear to have been principally engaged in some
aspect of developing, manufacturing, marketing, distributing, selling, licensing, or supporting software and hardware
products, devices, and services and that a substantial portion of those CFCs’ own earnings and profits were from
such activities.” (Def’s Cross-Mot Summ J & Resp at 14 n 15.) However, Defendant points to evidence that “some
CFCs clearly engaged primarily in classic treasury management or investment trading activities, which the 1995
legislature plainly intended to exclude from ‘sales’ under ORS 314.665(6)(a).” (Id.) Plaintiff appears to contest the
latter point. (See Ptf’s Memo Further Supp Mot Summ J at 17.) Based on the wording of Defendant’s argument,
including its characterization of the issue as a “computational matter,” the court will allow the parties to seek to
resolve this point in proceedings following this order; if they are unable to do so, the court will treat its order as one
for partial summary judgment. (Id.) See TCR 47 C.

As Plaintiff explained at oral argument, the reinclusion clause increases the sales factor denominator only
30

by the amount of the CFCs’ deferred earnings and profits, which are calculated net of the CFCs’ expenses; the
CFCs’ sales are their gross receipts. (Statement of Robert Mitchell, Oral Argument, Apr 4, 2023, 1:09; see also
Ptf’s Memo Further Supp Mot Summ J at 4.)

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that an addition of income to the tax base should be accompanied by additions to the

denominator of the apportionment fraction. See generally Hellerstein et al., State Taxation at ¶

9.15[2] (“In short, a state should not be able to have it both ways: including income of

subsidiaries in the parent’s apportionable tax base on the theory that the parent and the subsidiary

are engaged in a unitary business but then apportioning such income by factors reflecting only

the parent's own operations on a separate-company basis.”); see generally, id. at 9.20[8][i]

(discussing statutory factor representation cases); id. at 9.15[2][a] (specifically discussing

inclusion of unitary subsidiary’s factors when apportioning parent’s dividend income).

Relief is available under ORS 314.667 for either of two reasons. First, the statute

expressly may be invoked when the formula in UDITPA does not “fairly represent” the extent of

the taxpayer’s business activity in Oregon. ORS 314.667(1). Alternatively, the statute has been

construed as a mechanism “to remedy unconstitutional results.” Twentieth Century-Fox v. Dept.

of Revenue, 299 Or 220, 228, 700 P2d 1035 (1985). Applying Oregon’s first-things-first

doctrine, the court begins with Plaintiff’s argument under the statutory “fairly represent”

standard. 31 See Sterling v. Cupp, 290 Or 611, 614, 625 P2d 123 (1981) (“The proper sequence is

31
Plaintiff implies that relief also requires that the case be “unusual,” even though nothing in the statute
expressly says so. (See, e.g., Ptf’s Memo Further Supp Mot Summ J at 25; Ptf’s Memo Mot Summ J at 19-20
(quoting Twentieth Century-Fox, 299 Or at 228 (statute applies “in unusual cases” where UDITPA formula does not
fairly represent taxpayer’s business activity).) This court reads Twentieth Century-Fox, as well as statements of the
UDITPA framers when taken in their greater context, as expressing an expectation that the standard formulas under
UDITPA will likely yield a fair result in most cases, not as prescribing an additional element of “unusualness” that is
either necessary or sufficient to obtain relief under a “safety valve” statute. See Twentieth Century-Fox, 299 Or at
224 (three-factor apportionment “typically” produces fair taxation although it is not “100 percent accurate for each
taxpayer or taxing jurisdiction"), see, e.g., William J. Pierce, The Uniform Division of Income for State Tax
Purposes,” 35 Taxes 747, 780-81 (Oct 1957) (“This section necessarily must be used where the statute reaches
arbitrary or unreasonable results so that its application could be attacked successfully on constitutional grounds.
Furthermore, it gives both the tax collection agency and the taxpayer some latitude for showing that for the
particular business activity, some more equitable method of allocation and apportionment could be achieved. Of
course, departures from the basic formula should be avoided except where reasonableness requires. Nonetheless,
some alternative method must be available to handle the constitutional problem as well as the unusual cases,
because no statutory pattern could ever resolve satisfactorily the problems for the multitude of taxpayers with
individual business characteristics.”) (emphasis added). Defendant’s administrative rules, in accordance with
regulations of the Multistate Tax Commission, previously included an “unusual case” requirement, but these
requirements were removed in 1999 and 2010, respectively. See OAR 150-314.670 (1997) (“ORS 314.670 may be

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to analyze the state’s law, including its constitutional law, before reaching a federal

constitutional claim.”).

1. Relief Under Statutory “Fairly Represent” Standard

The relevant portion of the “safety valve” statute is materially the same as when the

legislature enacted it in 1965 as part of UDITPA:

“(1) If the application of the allocation and apportionment provisions of ORS 314.605 to
314.675 do not fairly represent the extent of the taxpayer’s business activity in this state,
the taxpayer may petition for and the Department of Revenue may permit, or the
department may require, in respect to all or any part of the taxpayer’s business activity:

“(a) Separate accounting;

“(b) The exclusion of any one or more of the factors;

“(c) The inclusion of one or more additional factors which will fairly represent the
taxpayer’s business activity in this state; or

“(d) The employment of any other method to effectuate an equitable allocation and
apportionment of the taxpayer’s income.

“(2) The department may adopt rules to promote uniformity and consistency with other
states in the application of the Uniform Division of Income for Tax Purposes Act.”

ORS 314.667. 32

a. Twentieth Century-Fox and later cases

invoked only where unusual fact situations (which ordinarily will be unique and nonrecurring) produce results which
violate a taxpayer’s rights under the constitution of Oregon or of the United States.”); note, OAR 150-314.670
(1999) (“Repealed 12/31/99”); Hellerstein et al, State Taxation at ¶9.20[4][c] (“In 2010, the MTC revised this
regulation to eliminate the [unusual case] language[.]”). The court is satisfied that there is no requirement to find an
“unusual case” before applying ORS 314.667. Accordingly, Plaintiff is neither helped nor harmed by the undisputed
fact that the TCJA’s requirement to repatriate up to 31 years’ worth of deferred CFC earnings and profits was a one-
time event that marked a substantial shift in US international tax policy. That law change was an unusual event, but
that fact does not help to resolve whether Oregon’s statutory apportionment system fails to “fairly represent” the
extent of the Water’s Edge Group’s business activity in Oregon or produces unconstitutional results.
32
See Or Laws 1965, ch 152, § 19; Or Laws 1984, ch 1, § 17 (Special Session) (adding requirement of
constitutional violation as condition to petition right); Or Laws 1999, ch 144, § 9 (deleting text added in 1984 and
adding rulemaking authority in subsection (2)). Twentieth Century-Fox involved pre-1984 tax years and thus text
materially identical to ORS 314.667(1). See 299 Or at 222 (tax years 1975-77).

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As the party advocating for an alternative apportionment method under ORS 314.667,

Plaintiff must prove two things. See Donald M. Drake Co. v. Dept. of Rev., 263 Or 26, 32, 500

P2d 1041 (1972) (“[T]he * ** party--the taxpayer or the Department of Revenue--who seeks to

invoke the applicability of ORS [314.667] has the burden of proof.”). First, “that the statutory

formula as a whole does not ‘fairly represent the extent of the taxpayer’s business activity in this

state.’” Twentieth Century-Fox, 299 Or at 233 (quoting what is now ORS 314.667(1)). Second,

that “the alternative method of allocating income is ‘reasonable.’” Id.

The court in Twentieth Century-Fox did not define the boundaries of the “fairly

represent” requirement in the abstract, except to state that the standard is not identical with

constitutional standards. See id. at 228. However, the steps the court took are instructive.

• First, the court sought to accurately define the taxpayer’s business activity in
Oregon as “the licensing of motion pictures” for exhibition by independent
theaters (Defendant’s position), as opposed to the distribution of copies of prints
made from negatives stored in California (the taxpayer’s position):

“It would be inaccurate to describe taxpayer’s business activity as
distributing reels of prints without reference to the negatives from which
they are made. Without the negative, the distribution prints could not be
made. The business activity of taxpayer in Oregon is the distribution for
display of the embodiment of a story or theme, photographed, edited,
acted and captured on film.”

Id. at 222, 234 (emphasis added).

• Second, the court examined whether the property factor under the standard
formula matched this broad definition of the activity. 33 The court found a flaw:
by valuing only the tangible personal property that physically entered Oregon, the
formula created “an artificial distinction between prints and negatives.” Id. at
237. Based on the parties’ stipulations, admitted allegations, and uncontested
testimony, the value of the reels of prints that the taxpayer distributed ($800 to
$1,000 per reel) was “woefully inadequate” as a means to capture the full extent
of the taxpayer’s business activity because the entire, multi-million-dollar cost to
produce the motion picture was assigned to the negatives, which never left the
33
The court focused on the property factor because the evidence showed that the payroll factor was zero
and the sales factor was accurate; therefore, any inaccuracy could reside only in the property factor. Id. at 234-35.

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state of production and thus could not be included in the property factor
numerator. Id. at 234 n 8 (sources of evidence); id. at 236 (inadequacy of
standard property factor).

After its in-depth comparison of the taxpayer’s actual activities to the kinds of activities

captured by the apportionment factors, the court went on to uphold as “reasonable” Defendant’s

proffered alternative apportionment method. This alternative method redefined the numerator of

the property factor to have two values, not one: (1) the total value of the taxpayer’s films in

release, multiplied by (2) the ratio of Oregon receipts to total receipts. The alternative method

made no change to the denominator (real and tangible personal property everywhere). Id. at 236.

The court announced the following test:

“[I]n the context of UDITPA, reasonableness has at least three components: (1)
the division of income fairly represents business activity and if applied uniformly
would result in taxation of no more or no less than 100 percent of taxpayer’s
income; (2) the division of income does not create or foster lack of uniformity
among UDITPA jurisdictions; and (3) the division of income reflects the
economic reality of the business activity engaged in by the taxpayer in Oregon.”
Id. at 233-34 (emphasis in original). On the facts of the case, there was substantial overlap

between the “fairly represents” part of component (1) and the “economic reality” requirement of

component (3). 34 By applying the alternative formula, the court concluded that the taxpayer

owed approximately $22,000 more in tax than under the standard formula. Id. at 225 n 3. 35

34
The court treated the two parts of component (1) separately, concluding first that Defendant’s alternative
method did not result in more than 100 percent of the taxpayer’s income being taxed, and second that the method
“fairly represent[ed]” the taxpayer’s business activity in Oregon in that it “accurately reflect[ed] the cost or value of
films owned by taxpayer and distributed for display in Oregon.” Id. at 236-37. As to component (2), the court
concluded that the method fostered uniformity by conforming to the formula developed by a major film-producing
state. And as to component (3), the court concluded that Defendant’s method “reflects the economic reality of the
distribution of motion pictures by taxpayer by discarding an artificial distinction between prints and negatives and
attributing to a film the costs of production, which more accurately reflects the business activities of the taxpayer.”
Id. at 237.

35
This court observes that, by introducing into the numerator of the property factor the same inputs (gross
receipts) that make up the sales factor, the modification achieved a result much like an extra “weighting” of the sales
factor, which the legislature later adopted over time until it eventually phased out the property and payroll factors
altogether. See Or Laws 2005, ch 832, §§ 48-48a (adopting a single-sales-factor method for tax years beginning on
or after July 1, 2005). Thus, arithmetically, the flaw that the court identified in Twentieth Century-Fox could be

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i. Crocker Equipment Leasing and Pacific Coca-Cola

Similarly to Twentieth Century-Fox, the court allowed alternative apportionment in

Crocker Equip. Leasing, Inc. v. Dept. of Rev., 314 Or 122, 838 P2d 552 (1992). 36

Notwithstanding the taxpayer’s name, it was a wholly owned subsidiary of a bank with which it

was engaged in a unitary “financial organization” business. See id. at 124-25, 128. The

taxpayer showed that some 97 percent to 98 percent of its income-producing assets were

intangibles, such as loans and equipment leases that represented “an alternative form of

financing.” Id. at 129 & n 4. However, the standard UDITPA formula, which was incorporated

into the administrative rule governing financial organizations, included only real or tangible

personal property in the property factor. Applying the equally weighted three-factor

apportionment formula still in place at that time, the court found that excluding intangibles from

the property factor “grossly distorted” the taxpayer’s Oregon income. Id. at 132 (internal

quotations omitted). This distortion was not corrected by the gross revenue factor because the

concept of equal weighting relied on a “built-in assumption that one-third of the net income is

derived from the use of property, one-third from services and one-third from selling.” Id. at 132

(internal quotations omitted). The court accepted the taxpayer’s proffered alternative to include

intangibles in the property factor. See id. at 132-34. As in Twentieth Century-Fox, there was

substantial overlap between the “fairly represents” part of component (1) and the “economic

described either (a) in the court’s terms, as an over-weighting of a standard property factor that ignored the real
source of most of the property value (an acted and edited story that the court treated as residing in the negatives), or
(b) as an under-weighting of the sales factor, which the court believed more accurately captured the relative share of
the value of the story delivered to the Oregon market.

36
In Crocker, the taxpayer was a financial organization excluded from UDITPA under ORS 314.615
(1992), but the court applied the substance of the “fairly represent” test under 314.667 because Defendant’s rules for
financial organizations incorporated that test verbatim. See id. at 130. As in Twentieth Century-Fox, the tax years at
issue preceded the 1984 amendments to ORS 314.667; the “fairly represent” test imported into Defendant’s rule did
not require the taxpayer to show that the standard apportionment method was unconstitutional. See id. at 125 (tax
years 1978-80).

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reality” test in component (3): in both instances, the court relied on the taxpayer’s uncontested

expert testimony that excluding intangibles from the property factor “does not reasonably reflect

how the income is generated for a bank” because a bank generates most of its income from

intangibles. Id. at 131-32, 133-34.

In contrast to Twentieth Century-Fox and Crocker, the court in Pacific Coca-Cola

Bottling v. Dept. of Rev., 307 Or 667, 773 P2d 1290 (1989) found no flaw in the standard

apportionment factor. The taxpayer, seeking alternative apportionment, pointed out that its most

valuable asset was its intangible trademark, which the taxpayer seemed to suggest had a taxable

situs at the taxpayer’s Georgia headquarters. See id. at 672. 37 However, the taxpayer presented

“[n]o reasoned argument” to show that this fact caused the statutory formula to be unfair. Id.

Furthermore, the parties had chosen to “bifurcate[e]” the case at trial, meaning that they sto

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Source: Frix Law Library, https://www.frixlaw.com/law-library/cases/10872829. Public record. Not legal advice.