Ivar Kreuger and IMCO: A case of taxation of fictitious income

This paper relates an episode of epic capital market fraud that previous research has linked to major twentieth-century legislative reforms of U.S. capital markets. In 1932, following the suicide of Ivar Kreuger, the companies representing two of the most popular and arguably the most widely distributed securities in the world, the Swedish holding company Kreuger & Toll AB and its U.S. subsidiary, International Match Company (IMCO), filed for bankruptcy. IMCO, the focus of this study, was alleged by bondholders' legal counsel to have overstated financial income and substantially overpaid federal income taxes. IMCO paid nearly $6 million in income taxes, the current equivalent of over $85 million.Using previously unexplored primary documents from the accountant hired by the bankruptcy trustees for IMCO, this paper investigates the effort to substantiate the claim for and to recover the federal income taxes paid because the payments were based on fictitious income.