Rushlight

The Rushlight partnership made a substantial profit on its war contracts for the year 1942. The Secretary of War on December 18, 1945, acting under the provisions of the Renegotiation Act, 1 unilaterally determined the partnership to have made excessive profits for the year 1942 in the amount of $80,000. Upon taxpayer’s petition for redetermination filed with the tax court, it reduced on *659 September 5, 1956, the amount of excessive profits to $66,700. 2 From such a determination, there is no appeal. The act says so.

Suit was brought by the government in the U. S. District Court for the District of Oregon for the 1942 excess profits. After allowing credits not here material, the district court entered judgment against the Rushlights for $48,330.99 plus interest from September 5, 1956. The result was to deny a defense asserted by the defendants and to hold the determination of the tax court to be untouchable. The defendants appeal the district court’s judgment and the government cross appeals on a question of interest.

No doubt if the district court’s judgment is upheld the defendants have paid dearly for their business experience with the government. The situation pulls at…

(concurring) .

I concur, but do not wish to join in the expression of sympathy for appellants, or to indicate that I would like to grant the relief they seek. It may be that, if all the facts were known, they are deserving of sympathy. But the record before us does not, in my view, disclose sufficient information concerning the transactions on which money was lost to warrant an expression of our emotional inclinations. We do know that the contracts on which appellants lost money involved entirely different kinds of work. For all we know, appellants may have made unjustifiably low bids on work which they were not qualified to do, and that but for this the Government could have had the work done by other contractors at only a slightly higher price.