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As far as we can discern from the record, Beech Trucking
controlled the drivers’ activities, exercising discretion over
when and how long they worked. Petitioner testified that Beech
Trucking drivers were dispatched out of Beech Trucking’s Little
Rock terminal; that Beech Trucking tried to keep all its 100 to
125 trucks manned so as to get “our drivers home most weekends”;
and that on a typical week, a Beech Trucking driver would leave
on a Sunday afternoon and “we would try to get him out as far as
we could in the early part of the week, and then start working
him back toward the house.”16 The record is silent as to any
control that ATS might have exercised over the Beech Trucking
drivers’ activities.
ATS hired the drivers and provided them some orientation.
On its income tax returns for the years at issue, however, Beech
Trucking deducted (as part of “Other deductions”) a separate item
identified as “hiring cost–-drivers”, from which we infer that
Beech Trucking reimbursed ATS for the cost of hiring the Beech
Trucking drivers. When ATS hired the Beech Trucking drivers,
they signed employment agreements wherein they agreed to be ATS
16 Most of the pertinent testimony regarding the Beech
Trucking drivers’ activities came from petitioner. As previously
noted, petitioner was both president of Beech Trucking and an
employee of ATS. As reflected in the quotations in the text
above, his testimony often employed, ambiguously, first-person
plural pronouns. On the basis of our careful review of
petitioner’s testimony in the context of the entire record, we
conclude that the testimony described in the text is most
reasonably understood to refer to petitioner’s activities as
president of Beech Trucking.
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