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business.60 JRJ Express, Inc. provides an example of self-
promotion as the taxpayer’s primary purpose. In JRJ Express,
Inc., the taxpayer was a courier business that delivered letters
and small packages from the United States to Guatemala. The
taxpayer’s sole shareholder’s brothers owned and controlled
several Guatemalan companies that made similar deliveries from
Guatemala to the United States and used the same company logo as
the taxpayer. Pursuant to an oral agreement, the taxpayer paid
the Guatemalan companies’ inbound expenses, in exchange for which
the Guatemalan companies printed and stuffed promotional
materials advertising the taxpayer’s business in all Guatemalan
mail bound for U.S. destinations. Id.
We concluded in JRJ Express, Inc. that the taxpayer’s
payments were primarily intended to protect or promote the
taxpayer’s delivery service. Because of the nature of the
taxpayer’s business, the promotion and marketing process was the
business’s “centerpiece”.61 Through the insertion of
60Another consideration under the first prong of the Lohrke
test, not applicable to the present case, is whether the taxpayer
faced a “‘clear proximate danger’” and made payments “‘to protect
an existing business from harm’”. Bone v. Commissioner, T.C.
Memo. 2001-43; JRJ Express, Inc. v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo.
1998-200 (quoting Young & Rubicam, Inc. v. United States, 187 Ct.
Cl. 635, 410 F.2d 1233, 1243 (1969)).
61In JRJ Express, Inc. v. Commissioner, supra, we also noted
that, due to the transient nature of many Guatemalan workers in
the United States, the taxpayer’s business faced a “clear
proximate danger” if the taxpayer could not maintain a “fluid
(continued...)
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