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or individual” also appears in section 38 of the Tariff Act of
1909, commonly called the Corporation Excise Tax Act of 1909,
Pub. L. 5, 61st. Cong., 1st Sess., ch. 6, 36 Stat. 11, 113.
Neither the parties nor the amici have directed our attention to,
and we have not found, any statutory explanation of any of these
terms. Our examination of the legislative history of the Revenue
Act of 1924 has not turned up any explanation of the shift from
“stockholder” to “shareholder”. We note that the
Administration’s proposed bill leading to the Revenue Act of 1924
retained the word “stockholder”, while the bill as reported by
the House Ways and Means Committee used the word “shareholder”.
We note also that the term “private stockholder or individual”
appears in paragraph (2) of section 2055(a) (and its 1939 Code
predecessor, section 812(d)), while the term “private shareholder
or individual” appears in paragraph (4) of the same section
2055(a). We have not found any explanation of the intended
difference between “stockholder” and “shareholder”, nor any
reason why “stockholder” was replaced by “shareholder” in the
Revenue Act of 1924. See Western Natl. Mut. Ins. Co. v.
Commissioner, 102 T.C. 338, 354 (1994), affd. 65 F.3d 90 (8th
Cir. 1995).
Section 1.501(a)-1(c), Income Tax Regs., provides as
follows:
(c) “Private shareholder or individual” defined. The
words “private shareholder or individual” in section 501
refer to persons having a personal and private interest in
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