Carpenter v. Commissioner
Open-knowledge reference entry

Carpenter v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 1966-228 (1966) was a case decided by the United States Tax Court. Carpenter v. Commissioner addressed the issue of whether a husband and wife could deduct the aggregate fair market value of the wife’s engagement ring from their income tax return, as a casualty loss under §165(a) and (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, after the husband inadvertently dropped the ring in their garbage disposal.
Facts
The petitioners were Nancy Carpenter and William Carpenter. During 1962, Nancy owned a diamond engagement ring worth $1,010. One day, in 1962, Nancy placed the ring in a water-glass of ammonia for purposes of cleaning the ring. Nancy then left the glass, with the ring inside, next to her kitchen sink.
Later that day, William Carpenter was washing dishes, and William inadvertently “picked up the glass and emptied its contents down the” sink drain.
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This entry incorporates text from “Carpenter v. Commissioner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.