Letter ruling reaffirms favorable treatment for sale of charter.

• Author: Reinbold, Melissa A.

Disposing of a valuable corporate charter is not as simple as a straight sale of the asset and can have unintended tax consequences if not properly structured. Corporations in certain regulated industries such as insurance or banking may have to jump through some regulatory hoops in transferring a charter. The requirements for such a transfer vary by state, but government agencies usually do not permit the charter to be transferred as a stand-alone asset. Therefore, the seller of a charter needs to go through certain steps and follow the requisite legal format to comply with the government agency requirements in order to properly effect the transfer.

The IRS has previously provided guidance on how a charter sale may be treated as a reorganization if certain conditions are met. The approved structures depend on the laws of the state and whether the state permits the sale of a single bank charter, but they have generally followed the structure in Rev. Proc. 89-50, with some acceptable deviations to comply with government agency requirements.

In May 2008, the Service issued Letter Ruling 200822022, which discusses the combination of bank subsidiaries' operations and a subsequent sale of a bank charter. The letter ruling recasts the events leading up to the sale of the bank charter into transaction steps constituting a tax-free reorganization and discusses the tax implications of each step of the reorganization.

Letter Ruling 200822022

Letter Ruling 200822022 provides guidance on a specific factual situation for the sale of a bank charter when state law will not permit a bank charter to be sold by itself. The key issues addressed were: (1) the steps of the reorganization needed to complete the sale of the charter; (2) the representations made by parties to the reorganization; and (3) the tax implications for the reorganization.

In the ruling, Acquirer and Target, both State A chartered banks and subsidiaries of Parent, a bank holding company, desired to combine their operations. Parent also wanted to sell Target's State A bank charter to Third-Party Holding Company, a State B corporation and bank holding company unrelated to Parent, which owns all the stock of Third-Party Bank. Government Agency would not permit a State A bank charter to be transferred by itself. Rather, it would approve the proposed sale of the bank charter only if a certain transaction form was utilized.

The form required by Government Agency to effect the transaction is as...