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Automatically Generated Penalties Do not Require Managerial Approval

Posted on June 6, 2019

This is the first of several posts on precedential cases decided by the Tax Court earlier this year regarding the IRC 6751 provision requiring preapproval by a manager before the assertion of certain penalties. The case of Walquist v. Commissioner, 152 T.C. No. 3 (February 25, 2019) represents the type of case that one might wish had been litigated by a petitioner other than a pro se petitioner that did not engage in the process; however, the outcome would almost certainly have been the same with a more robust litigation participant. In the Walquist case the Tax Court addresses the imposition of a penalty in a setting in which the IRS argues that automation removes the need for prior managerial approval. The court agreed.

The IRS sent the Walquists a statutory notice of deficiency for 2014 determining a liability over $13,000 and a related accuracy penalty. Although petitioners earned almost $100,000 in 2014, on their return they claimed a deduction for almost the same amount based upon a “Remand for Lawful Money Reduction,” a tax protestor type claim. The IRS disallowed this claimed deduction resulting in the deficiency determined. The IRS handled the case through its Automated Exam Correspondence Unit designed to minimize the amount of human involvement in the audit.

The Automated Exam process generated a 30-day letter to petitioners. Because the amount of the liability determined through the process exceeded $5,000, the program automatically placed on the notice an accuracy related penalty of 20% of the liability. Petitioners did not respond to the 30-day letter, resulting in the issuance of the SNOD. Petitioners timely filed a petition with the Tax Court in which they continued to assert tax protestor type arguments. The tax protestor activity did not stop and the court gives a detailed accounting of the time wasting efforts of petitioners before it ultimately imposes the IRC 6673 penalty because of their post-petition actions. I will not describe this aspect of the case as it is relatively boring.

The ultimate finding of the court with respect to the requirement for managerial approval is that:

Because the penalty was determined mathematically by a computer software program without the involvement of a human IRS examiner, we conclude that the penalty was ‘automatically calculated through electronic means,’ sec. 6751(b)(2)(B), as the plain text of the statutory exception requires.

The court goes on to say that this conclusion is consistent with the description of the imposition of a penalty in this situation as described in the Internal Revenue Manual and the context in which the statutory exception appears in IRC 6751. Computer generated penalties do not raise the concerns that caused Congress to enact IRC 6751 because no one is imposing them in order to influence to taxpayer to accept the liability or otherwise to coerce an outcome. The court stated that if the penalty imposed under these circumstances fails to meet the statutory exception it is difficult to imagine a penalty that would meet the exception.

The court noted that its conclusion in this precedential opinion was consistent with unpublished orders that it had issued in recent years. Another reason for paying attention to those orders.

The result here makes perfect sense. The IRS did not impose this penalty as a bargaining chip. The court provides a detailed analysis for its decision. Perhaps the only thing surprising about the opinion is that a precedential opinion on this issue did not previously exist. Although petitioners did nothing to advance their argument that the exception should not apply, their failure did not create the result in this case.

The decision here was the first of several precedential IRC 6751 opinions issues in the first few months of the year as the court continues to answer the questions raised by this unusual statute. We will cover all of the opinions in the coming days.

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