438
Opinion of the Court
mated estate tax. To be sure, a part of our opinion seems to endorse petitioner's view that payment only occurs at assessment:
"It is [the] erroneous assessment that gave rise to a claim for refund. Not until then was there such a claim as could start the time running for presenting the claim. In any responsible sense payment was then made by the application of the balance credited to the petitioners in the suspense account . . . ." Id., at 661.
But the remittance in Rosenman, unlike the ones here, was not governed by a "deemed paid" provision akin to § 6513, and we therefore had no occasion to consider the implications of such a provision for determining when a tax is "paid" under the predecessor to § 6511. See ibid. (noting that "no extraneous relevant aids to construction have been called to our attention"). Moreover, if the quoted passage had represented our holding, we would have broadly rejected the Government's argument that payment occurred when the remittance of estimated estate tax was made, instead of rejecting the argument, as we did, only because it was not in accord with the "tenor" of the "business transaction," id., at 663.1
We observe, finally, that Baral's position—to the extent he submits that payment occurs only at the Service's assess-ment—would work to the detriment of taxpayers who timely file their returns and claim a refund or credit as compensa-1 Central to our analysis in this regard was a concern that the Service should not be able to treat the same remittance as a payment for statute of limitations purposes—disadvantaging the taxpayer by decreasing the time in which a refund claim could be filed—and as a deposit for purposes of accrual of interest on overpayments—disadvantaging the taxpayer by starting the accrual of interest only at assessment. Rosenman, 323 U. S., at 662-663. Indeed, we suggested that an amendment to the Code disapproving of the Service's treatment of remittances as deposits for interest purposes might change the analysis. Id., at 663 (citing Current Tax Payment Act of 1943, § 4(d), 57 Stat. 140) (presently codified at 26 U. S. C. § 6401(c)).
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