Menu
Tax Notes logo

Calculating Interest When the IRS Makes a Restitution Based Assessment

Posted on Feb. 23, 2016

The case of United States v. Janean Del’Andrae provides further insight into what happens when the IRS makes an assessment based on a restitution order.  We have talked about restitution based assessments previously here and here.  This relatively new basis for assessment came into being with the passage of the Firearms Excise Tax Improvement Act of 2010 and the creation of IRC 6201(a)(4) allowing assessment based on restitution orders in criminal cases.  Some of the kinks are still being worked out and this case illustrates one of the kinks.  The district court’s decision to award attorney’s fees in this context confuses me and other aspects of the opinion confuse me.  That confusion may make for a confusing and disjointed post and I apologize.  The facts developed in the opinion do not seem to warrant an attorney’s fees award against the government here but I will circle back to that at the end.  Getting to the result of what interest the taxpayer owes following a restitution based assessment provides the most important aspect of this case.

As the Court explains in the case, the new basis for assessment did not immediately cause the IRS to make assessments using this procedure. The IRS waited for instructions from its lawyers on what to do and those instructions initially came out in Chief Counsel Notice 2011-18.  Two years later in Chief Counsel Notice 2013-12 additional guidance was provided.  The Court states that “procedures for the assessment process were not officially developed until the Chief Counsel Notice 2013-12 was issued on July 31, 2013.”  That statement does not make sense to me because the 2013 notice does not deal with assessment procedures but rather with the process of how to handle a restitution case in litigation.  I think the Court may have misstated the purpose of this notice and the timing of the procedures for dealing with restitution based assessments.  The Notice issued in 2011 deals much more directly with assessment procedures.  Both of these notices are Chief Counsel notices designed to give guidance to Chief Counsel lawyers and not necessarily to the IRS.

Here, the taxpayer’s restitution order occurred in 2012. The delay of the IRS in implementing procedures for restitution assessments creates problems that ultimately lead to the award of attorney’s fees against the IRS but I am uncertain that the Court quite got the timing right in attributing the problem to the 2013 notice.  The place to focus on IRS procedures is not notices issued by Chief Counsel’s office but changes to the Internal Revenue Manual.  Here, the provisions for restitution based assessments first appeared in IRM 5.19.23 on June 6, 2014, and IRM 4.8.6 in October 7, 2014.  The new IRM provisions followed the Interim Guidance on Criminal Restitution Procedures issued in SBSE 04-0214-0013 dated February 5, 2014 Except for how this impacts the decision on attorney’s fees, it is not especially relevant but does create more confusion in trying to follow the opinion.

Janean Del’Andrae pled guilty to one count of tax evasion. The opinion is not clear about the count to which she pled or how many counts with which she was charged.  The IRS charged that she not only evaded her personal income taxes for the year 2005 but also that she participated in evading the taxes of Del-Co Western Corporation, a company in which she and her husband were officers.  The court makes a passing reference to payroll taxes but the remainder of the opinion seems to make it clear the evasion of corporate income taxes was the problem.  The sentencing court ordered restitution in the amount of $138,509.50 calculated to cover the corporate taxes for 2004 ($49,845.37) and 2005 ($38,307.13) as well as her individual income taxes for 2005 ($48,357.00).  The judgment against her was entered on July 11, 2012, and she stroked a check that day for the full amount of the restitution (making her an unusual defendant, most of whom do not have the money to pay the tax at this stage of their case) and tendered it to the clerk of court.  On September 17, 2012, the IRS received the payment.

The opinion does not state what happened next but maybe nothing happened. On September 12, 2014, the court granted defendant’s Motion to Enforce Plea Agreement and issued an order requiring the IRS to give the defendant credit for the restitution payment.  The order required the IRS to credit the payment on July 11, 2012 even though it took the court over 60 days to deliver the check to the IRS.  It appears the IRS was significantly delayed in making the assessment probably because it took the IRS a long time to develop the assessment procedures for restitution based assessments.  I agree that the defendant should get credit from the date of payment but wonder how the payment of the interest on the money for those 60 days was credited between the judicial and executive branches.

The court states that the IRS eventually assessed the appropriate amount of taxes. It also assessed interest on the taxes from the due date of the returns until July 11, 2012, when it gave credit to the defendant and the corporation for the payment of the taxes.  The assessment of interest occurred without using the deficiency procedures which seems appropriate under these circumstances.  The defendant continued to dispute the correct amount of the corporate liability for 2005 so the IRS did not assess the liability for that period.  One of the problems with this opinion is that the Court’s description of events does not use the terms that one might expect or use them with sufficient precision to allow me to know exactly what happened.  It is clear, however, that in March 2015 the corporation made a payment towards its 2013 liability.  In doing so it overpaid the 2013 liability by $65,917.  The IRS latched onto the overpayment and used it toward additional corporate and personal tax liabilities.  The use of this overpayment creates the focus of the litigation.  Defendant filed a motion for an order to show cause seeking answers concerning the application of the payments.  The balance of the opinion essentially focuses on how the IRS did and should have used the overpayment and why its actions were right or wrong.

The restitution order contemplated that the IRS would charge interest and penalties but did not order the payment of these amounts or spell them out in any way. The defendant argues that the IRS should not assess interest for the time prior to the date of the restitution order.  The defendant further argues that the IRS should follow deficiency procedures in order to assess interest on a tax liability determined by a restitution order.  The IRS argues that interest runs from the due date of the return for restitution payments as it does for all liabilities and further argues that the use of deficiency procedures is unnecessary to assess interest on the amount listed in a restitution order.  The court agreed with the IRS that interest on restitution assessments need not follow the deficiency procedure but may occur in the same manner as the assessment of the underlying tax assessed pursuant to the restitution procedure.

The second issue concerns the application of the overpayment on the 2013 corporate taxes to the personal liability of the defendant. The court says that the IRS argued that the application of a corporate payment to the personal liability of the individual is proper because “Defendant [the individual] and Del-Co are jointly and severally liable for the tax and related interest that Defendant evaded.”  The court further states that the IRS argued, “the joint and several liability arises because Defendant agreed to pay restitution for the loss caused by her evasion of Del-Co’s taxes.”  I am unconvinced that the IRS argued the case in the way described by the court.  If it did I am confused.  It is possible the IRS made an alter ego argument.  Whatever was argued, the court found that the defendant and the corporations were not jointly and severally liable and that the IRS should not take payments on the corporate account and apply them to the individual liability.  If the IRS position reflects a legal conclusion that every time an individual is convicted and restitution is ordered based on corporate and individual liabilities this type restitution order allows it to move money between the individual and corporate accounts, then this decision represents a repudiation of that position.  If the IRS was simply arguing here that, based on these facts, the finances of the corporation and the individuals merged, the IRS lost a factual argument.

After reaching this conclusion the Court found that “because the IRS delayed the application of Defendant’s restitution payments and may have improperly applied Del-Co’s overpayment to Defendant’s tax account, the Defendant incurred unnecessary costs to clarify the IRS’s actions” and therefore costs and attorney’s fees were ordered against the United States. The delay in applying the payments here seems to have resulted from the implementation of a new statute and did not harm petitioners.  I do not see that as a basis for awarding fees.  To the extent that the IRS inappropriately applied the payment of the corporation, I feel the court should have provided more information about the steps that were taken to fix the wrongful application before the court proceeding as a prerequisite to the award of attorney’s fees.

I take away from this case the reinforcement of the IRS position that interest may be assessed on restitution assessments in the same summary manner as the assessment of the tax itself. The application of payments issue, if it reflects a legal position asserted by the IRS in restitution cases, represents a victory for taxpayers.  Because I am unconvinced that the IRS was arguing this as a legal matter, I think that the application of payments issue is simply a factual determination that must be determined on a case by case basis.  There will be many more cases exploring the restitution assessment procedure as this becomes more common.  I hope they offer a clearer view of what the parties presented but even in the murky view offered by this case, the issue of interest in restitution cases gets a little clearer.

DOCUMENT ATTRIBUTES
Subject Areas / Tax Topics
Authors
Copy RID