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9th Circuit Finds No Conflicts of Interest or Duress in Taxpayer Challenges to Extensions of the Statute of Limitations

Posted on June 21, 2017

A recent published Ninth Circuit opinion, Twenty-Two Strategic Investment Funds v US, illustrates the difficulties taxpayers face when they argue that the courts should disregard a consent to extend the statute of limitations (SOL) on assessment due to an advisor’s conflict of interest or a taxpayer’s alleged duress.

Twenty-Two Strategic Investments involved an investment in the ill-fated KPMG BLIPs loss generating foreign currency investment tax shelter.

For those wanting a brief summary of the shelter, the opinion serves that up nicely:

In order to participate in the BLIPS program, a client would establish a single-member limited liability company (“LLC”), which would take out a specific loan with a participating lender and contribute all of the loan funds to a strategic investment fund, an LLC managed by Presidio, which would then purchase foreign currency assets. After a brief period, usually about sixty days, the client would exit the BLIPS program, the assets would be sold, and the loan would be repaid with interest and pre-payment penalties. The result of this series of transactions was a tax loss for the client approximately equal to the amount of the offset he or she was seeking.

Presto. Tax losses. The only problem was that IRS and DOJ got wind of the scheme, and civil liability and even criminal sanctions followed. This post, however, is not so much about BLIPs but the after effects for one of the unlucky investors who the IRS eventually came after in light of the BLIPs going bust.

The procedural issues in the case turned on the taxpayer arguing that extensions of the SOL on assessment were invalid. There were two reasons that the taxpayer argued the extensions were invalid: 1) the taxpayer’s accountant and return preparer Smith had a conflict of interest which the IRS knew about and 2) the individual taxpayer Gonzales left holding the bag on the consequences of the disallowed losses signed the extension under duress. If the extensions were invalid, the assessments were out of time.

This is a published Ninth Circuit opinion, and that is in part why it drew my interest (there are not so many published circuit court tax procedure opinions). Yet the taxpayer’s arguments were pretty thin.

On the conflict issue, the taxpayer had pointed out that his accountant Smith “instrumental in selling the [tax] shelter to Gonzales,” received a commission for involving Gonzales in BLIPS, and signed the 2000 tax return that the IRS was auditing.”

There are some cases in the TEFRA context (this is a TEFRA case but TEFRA discussions on the blog draw as much interest as last week’s PBS documentary on steel manufacturing in Warsaw Pact countries following the reforms of Soviet Premier Kosygin so I will skip those) where criminal investigations of the tax matters partner resulted in an impermissible conflict that the courts concluded prevented the TMP from binding the partnership.

Here, however, the issue related to the individual taxpayer binding himself, not from a TMP who the courts noted had incentives to extend the SOL that ran directly counter to the individual investors ultimately potentially liable for civil taxes and penalties.

Not enough for a conflict that would bring into question the extension’s validity:

Other than this vague implication of wrongdoing, Gonzales offers no evidence that Smith’s involvement in promoting BLIPS and his involvement in preparing Gonzales’s 2000 tax return combined to create a conflict of interest three years later when the IRS approached Gonzales himself about extending the limitations period. There is no evidence in the record that the IRS contacted Smith during the time he was advising Gonzales to request that Gonzales agree to extend his limitations period. Nor is there evidence that Smith ever provided any advice to Gonzales regarding extending his limitations period. Furthermore, as the district court observed, “[a]lthough Steve Smith represented Gonzales during the audit that flowed from his 2000 tax return, Gonzales had designated different representation before signing the consents.

The remaining issue concerned Gonzales’ argument that he signed the extensions under duress. Duress generally requires evidence of wrongful pressure to coerce someone into signing a contract or other agreement that they would ordinarily not sign. Duress in the tax context is an “action[] by one party which deprive[s] another of his freedom of will to do or not to do a specific act.” Price v. Comm’r, 43 T.C.M. 18 (T.C. 1981), aff’d, 742 F.2d 1460 (7th Cir. 1984).

Gonzales’ duress argument centered on two main events: IRS met with him without his legal representative and an IRS agent served a summons on him at his residence before asking him to extend the SOL. As with the conflict argument, the court had little problem disposing of it as a challenge to the extension.

Gonzales can recall no details of the meeting other than its location. He cannot remember any questions agent Doerr asked him or any particular things agent Doerr said that were intimidating or coercive. His testimony was that he was worried that he might be in legal trouble and that the IRS could ruin his life. His conclusion was founded on inference. However, the fact that the agent declined to assure Gonzales that the IRS would not be pursuing lawful action against him does not justify an inference that Gonzales was deprived of his freedom of will to such a degree that he signed the consents to the extensions under duress.

Similarly, the court noted that there was nothing out of the ordinary with the agent serving a summons at his residence; in fact, Section 7602 provides that it may be “delivered in hand to the person to whom it is directed, or left at his last and usual place of abode.” Simply put, that the summons caused Gonzales stress was not enough; stress or taxpayer fear following IRS agents taking legally authorized actions do not amount to duress.

Parting Thoughts

Taxpayers sign extensions of the SOL for many reasons. After the fact, it is difficult to unwind those extensions, just as it is difficult to unwind a stipulation, as Keith discussed last week here.

The duress issue in this case to me is the more interesting of the two. There are a handful of cases where the courts have found that IRS agents have impermissibly threatened taxpayers to sign documents. For example, in the 1973 TC memo opinion Robertson v Commissioner an agent’s specific threat to seize a taxpayer’s house if he did not sign a form constituted duress.

Duress also comes up in the context of determining whether a spouse agreed to file a joint tax return or other document (including an extension of the SOL) in light of pressure or abuse coming from the other spouse. There are a handful of cases as well looking into whether a spouse’s actions reach the level of duress. That is an issue we discuss in the Saltzman Book treatise; the upshot is that on occasion coercive forces both outside and inside the marriage have reached the level for a court to conclude that the document would not have been signed except for the constraint applied to the taxpayer’s will.

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