“Can’t anyone here play this game?”

In response to a proposed decision document, the Court entered the following order:

BARBARA J. SNEIDER-PEDONE, Petitioner v. COMMISSIONER OF INTERNAL REVENUE, Respondent 

Docket No. 33172-21. 

ORDER This case was called from the calendar for the Trial Session of the Court at Cleveland, Ohio on November 7, 2022. In the Petition, filed October 18, 2021, petitioner disputed respondent’s denial of relief from joint and several liability under section 6015 for tax years 2012 and 2013. However, petitioner attached the Notice of Determination only for tax year 2013, not for tax year 2012. Neither party has since remedied this omission, so we remain unsure whether petitioner’s claims regarding tax year 2012 are validly at issue in this case. On November 4, 2022, respondent filed a Status Report to inform the Court that a basis for settlement had been reached. On November 7, 2022, the parties filed a Settlement Stipulation and a Proposed Stipulated Decision. The Settlement Stipulation contains petitioner’s Statement of Account (Form 3623) for tax years 2012 and 2013, prior to any relief that she may be granted under section 6015. The Proposed Stipulated Decision proposes to remove petitioner’s “deficiency” for tax years 2012 and 2013 and to find an overpayment for tax year 2012. The Petition requests declaratory relief under section 6015, not a redetermination of deficiency. Indeed, there is no notice of deficiency before us in this case. Therefore, any proposed stipulated decision must refer to “relief from liability,” not to a reduction of deficiency. 

Accordingly, we will strike the Proposed Stipulated Decision and give the parties 30 days to file a corrected proposed stipulated decision that conforms to the relief requested in the Petition. Upon due consideration, and for cause, it is 

ORDERED that this case is continued and that jurisdiction is retained by this Division of the Court. It is further  

ORDERED that the parties file a status report by December 19, 2022, containing petitioner’s Notice of Determination for tax year 2012. It is further 

ORDERED that the parties’ Proposed Stipulated Decision, filed on November 7, 2022, is hereby stricken from the record. It is further 

ORDERED that by December 19, 2022, the parties file a corrected proposed stipulated decision that conforms to the relief requested in the Petition. 

Petitioner in this case filed her petition pro se.  That almost always means that the Chief Counsel attorney prepared the decision document.  Here, the decision document includes a year for which the Court cannot be certain that it has the ability to render a decision.  Without the ticket to Tax Court, here a notice of determination, the Court lacks the ability to confirm that petitioner has properly invoked its jurisdiction. 

It’s not unusual for a petitioner to fail to attach the document serving as the ticket to Tax Court.  If petitioner fails to attach that document, it falls to Chief Counsel attorney to file the document or move to dismiss.  Here, petitioner included an appropriate determination for one year but not the other.  No one raised an issue concerning the dissonance between the years listed in the petition and the year reflected on the decision document until the Court challenged the document.  Overlooking this dissonance is fairly easy but should be on a checklist the Chief Counsel attorney would have in preparing the answer and the reviewer should have in reviewing the answer.  So, something fell down in the Chief Counsel office.

The second mistake reflects a deeper problem because it suggests that the Chief Counsel attorney did not understand the nature of the case.  Because petitioner pursued the case pro se, she would not be expected to understand the difference between a deficiency and a determination.  The same cannot be said for the attorneys in Chief Counsel’s office.  The document presented to the Court would have been prepared by Chief Counsel’s office which has access to templates covering this situation.  Perhaps the language of deficiency versus relief from liability merely reflects a failure to select the proper template for use in preparing the document but it also reflects either a more fundamental misunderstanding of the different types of innocent spouse cases or the nature of innocent spouse cases.  Some type of additional training seems in order but perhaps that training has come in the form of a public rebuke from the Court in rejecting the proposed document.

Chief Counsel has been hiring lots of new attorneys.  It takes some time to understand the nuances of the practice which is why every document that goes out the door gets reviewed by a manager in that office.  Here, the failed document appears to result from a docket attorney that may not have understood exactly what was at issue and a review that did not take the time to check the determination passing that task along to the judge who had to provide feedback in a public manner.

The posts on bloopers results not from any empirical study suggesting that Chief Counsel’s office makes more mistakes now than in the past.  I can attest that it made plenty of these kinds of mistakes when I worked there both as an attorney and as a manager.  Hopefully, we can continue to learn from them.  As I have written in prior posts I had my fair share of painful bloopers over the years.