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and to hide this skimming from petitioner’s board of trustees by
falsifying the records of the bingo operations. Part of the
skimmed funds was used for unauthorized repairs and renovations,
part was used for unauthorized and illegal compensation paid to
bingo workers, and part went into Zeve’s and Popovic’s pockets.
As petitioner puts it on brief, Zeve and Popovic were stealing
petitioner’s bingo proceeds, “pure and simple”.
Neither side has directed our attention to any court opinion
in the inurement area involving theft from an organization by an
insider with respect to that organization, and our research has
not led us to any such opinion. Our research has uncovered 31
other places in the current text of the Internal Revenue Code of
1986 in which “inures”, or a variant such as “inure” or
“inurement”, is used. All of these uses involve charitable or
other types of exempt organizations. Most of these uses, like
that in section 501(c)(3), prohibit an improper inurement, while
some require that an entire item inure to the benefit of the
favored organization. None of these uses materially assists in
our analysis of the circumstances, if any, in which a theft
constitutes an inurement. Also, the regulations do not deal
directly with the question before us.
Although our search must be for the meaning of the statutory
term, “inures”,10 we may be guided by our understanding of what
10 See O.W. Holmes, “The Theory of Legal Interpretation”,
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