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standards of the Supreme Court, * * * the teaching of Rothensies
is that [the doctrine of equitable recoupment] is not a flexible
doctrine, but a doctrine strictly limited, and limited for good
reason." Ford v. United States, 276 F.2d at 23. The Court of
Claims did not cite United States v. Herring, supra, and United
States v. Bowcut, 287 F.2d 654 (9th Cir. 1961), and Rev. Rul. 71-
56, supra, had not yet been issued.
The "good reason" referred to in Ford v. United States,
supra, is the avoidance of the kind of staleness that the Supreme
Court feared in Rothensies v. Electric Storage Battery Co.,
supra.
That concern does not apply in the case at hand. An
automatic feature arising from the statutory relationship between
the estate tax and the income tax is that once the value of the
item included in the gross estate is finally determined, there is
little or no factual issue with respect to the time-barred claim;
hence there is no genuine issue of staleness. Furthermore, as
the value improperly excluded from (or included in) the gross
estate automatically is the same amount erroneously included in
(or excluded from) gross income, neither the Commissioner nor the
taxpayer is required to perform extensive additional
recordkeeping or investigation with respect to the time-barred
claim. Finally, unlike the overpaid excise taxes in Rothensies
v. Electric Storage Battery Co., supra, which had been collected
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