The Tax Court is truly a unique court. It is neither fish nor fowl, as Prof. Brant Hellwig so nicely explains in his article “The Constitutional Nature of the U.S. Tax Court,” 35 Va. Tax Rev. 269 (2015). That is, all efforts to type the Tax Court as part of the Legislative Branch, Judicial Branch, or Executive Branch of the federal government are flawed, both as a matter of theory and as a matter of practice. Channeling Felix Cohen and other Legal Realists, Brant sensibly concludes that we don’t really need to worry about “where” the Tax Court belongs in the Constitutional structure. It’s indeterminate position poses no threat to the structural integrity of the federal government, and its useful work in resolving taxpayer disputes with the IRS does not depend on its precise location in any branch.

But there is no doubt that the Tax Court exercises the “judicial power” of the United States. The Supreme Court said so in Freytag v. Commissioner, 501 U.S. 868 (1991). And part of that “judicial power” is the power to apply equitable principles and doctrines to the disputes that are properly brought before the Court for resolution. Prof. Leandra Lederman has a lovely article on this subject: “Equity and the Article I Court: Is the Tax Court’s. Exercise of Equitable Powers Constitutional?” 5 Fla. Tax Rev. 357 (2001).

It is important to remember that equitable doctrines are not simply free-floating grants of power. Equitable doctrines are linked to, and bounded by, a set of principles. But what distinguishes equitable principles from legal rules is that the application of equity is highly contingent on the facts before the court. The great legal historian F. W. Maitland put it this way in his 1910 Lectures On Equity: “I do not think that any one has expounded or ever will expound equity as a single, consistent system, an articulate body of law. It is a collection of appendixes between which there is no very close connection.” (p. 19) And in this 1913 law review article, Professor Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld discussed the difficulty of teaching equity as a system of rules separate from legal rules. I think it this way: equity fixes problems that legal rules cannot fix.

One equitable doctrine that might apply here is equitable tolling. When litigants show that, despite diligent efforts, some extraordinary circumstance prevented them from protecting their rights by timely filing within a period of limitations, a court will equitably toll the limitation period. See e.g. Holland v. Florida, 560 U.S. 631 (2010). The idea of “tolling” means that the limitations period is suspended for the tolling period. That is, it stops running and then starts running again when the tolling period ends, picking up where it left off. Artis v. District of Columbia, 138 S.Ct. 594 (2018).

Remember, this is equity, not a hard and fast legal rule or doctrine. So how much diligence a litigant must show varies with circumstances. Similarly, how extraordinary the barrier had to be also varies with circumstance. If the Tax Court applies that doctrine, it could decide—consistent with the logic of my very first paragraph—that the days in which Congress’s failure to fund the Court forced it to shut its doors should stop the running of any applicable limitation period. The Court may decline to apply equitable tolling, however, for two reasons.

First, the Tax Court has repeatedly said it cannot equitably toll jurisdictional time periods and it believes that the relevant time periods in the Tax Code are jurisdictional. I believe the Tax Court is simply wrong that the deficiency and CDP time periods are jurisdictional. That’s what I explained in the prior blog posts and in my SSRN paper.

Even if the time periods are jurisdictional, however, I believe there is good authority to toll them nonetheless. The authority is from the Supreme Court. In Honda v. Clark, 386 U.S. 484 (1967), 4,100 plaintiffs of Japanese descent whose assets had been seized by the U.S. during World War II sued for recovery years after the applicable limitation period had ended. The district court dismissed the cases “on the ground that the court lacked jurisdiction over the subject matter of the actions because they were not commenced within the time set forth in section 34(f) of the Trading with the Enemy Act.” 356 F.2d 351, 355 (D.C. Cir. 1966). Both the district court and the D.C. Circuit dismissed their suit for the standard reason: equitable principles did not apply to when limitation periods were a waiver of sovereign immunity. The D.C. Circuit gave the standard analysis: “All conditions of the sovereign’s consent to be sued must be complied with, and the failure to satisfy any such condition is fatal to the court’s jurisdiction.” 356 F.2d at 356.

The Supreme Court disagreed. While noting the general rule, it characterized the rule as a presumption and said that one needed to look at the particular statutory scheme at issue to discern purpose. Whether or not the time period was jurisdictional was totally absent from the Court’s approach to applying equitable tolling. The Court concluded it was “much more consistent with the overall congressional purpose to apply a traditional equitable tolling principle, aptly suited to the particular facts of this case and nowhere eschewed by Congress, to preserve petitioners’ cause of action.” 386 U.S. at 501.

The Supreme Court’s focus in Honda (and later in other cases, as I explain in my paper) was on the relationship between Congress and the limitation period. When you approach the limitation periods in §6213 and §6330(d) in that way, I believe the approach used by the Supreme Court in Honda strongly support application of equitable tolling, in two ways.

First, as I have argued here, the Tax Court itself has relied upon the great remedial purposes of §6213 and §6330 to in fact enlarge what it believes are jurisdictional time periods under certain circumstances. A careful reading of its cases shows that what animates its decisions is the remedial purpose of the statutory scheme that allows taxpayers a day in court before either (1) being forced face a tax assessment and its consequences or (2) being forced to pay an assessed tax. To count the shutdown days as part of a limitations period would run counter to that remedial purpose.

Second, I again restate the idea of my first paragraph. This is not a situation where a taxpayer would seek equitable tolling because of some individual government employee’s bad behavior. This is Congressional bad behavior. Another way to think of the relationship is this: if the time periods are part of Congress’s waiver of Sovereign Immunity, and if only Congress can waive Sovereign Immunity, then one can reasonably find that Congress itself has here waived its immunity by ceasing to fund the government.

The second reason that the Tax Court might look askance at applying equitable tolling here is that the doctrine usually applies in a fact pattern where the party seeking tolling has done all it can. Here, there may be instances where that is not true. For example, a taxpayer may not have even attempted to file a petition when the last day ran during the shutdown period. Or the taxpayer may not have even been prepared to file during the shutdown period and only prepares and files once the shutdown period ends. Most importantly, a taxpayer’s period might have been disrupted by the shutdown period but may not have ended during the shutdown period. How is the Tax Court supposed to measure a taxpayer’s diligence in that situation, when no one knew until Friday that the government would reopen on Monday?

I do not know the answer to these questions because equity is a case-by-case determination. The Tax Court can help avoid the time and effort of applying equitable tolling by applying a uniform counting rule that simply disregards the shutdown days, based on the idea underlying FRCP 6, as I will argue in an article I hope to publish in Tax Notes soon. Even there, however, there will be cases that are not covered even by a broad reading of FRCP 6. That will be the cases where the last day of the period came after the shutdown ended. Yet there may be such cases that command the sympathy of the Tax Court. I think the Court has the power to act and to apply equitable tolling in the cases where the circumstances support it.

Four of the five factors point to treating §6213 as a claims processing rule.  Again, this is basically a summary of what I have written in this paper posted on SSRN.  As usual, please comment on any errors or omissions that you spot. 

1. Mandatory Language

As it currently reads, §6213(a) now contains five sentences.  The first sentence contains the limitations period, as follows: “Within 90 days, or 150 days if the notice is addressed to a person outside the United States, after the notice of deficiency authorized in section 6212 is mailed … the taxpayer may file a petition with the Tax Court for a redetermination of the deficiency.” 

Notice there is no mandatory language.  Nothing in that sentence tells the reader what happens if the taxpayer misses the 90/150 day deadline.  And nothing in that sentence gives the Tax Court the power to hear or decide matters raised in the petition. 

2. Magic Words

The word “jurisdiction” does not appear in the first sentence.  One finds the jurisdictional grant to the Tax Court over in §6214, which provides that the Tax Court has “jurisdiction to redetermine the correct amount of the deficiency even if the amount so redetermined is greater than the amount of the deficiency…and to determine whether any additional amount, or any addition to the tax should be assessed, if claim therefor is asserted by the Secretary at or before the hearing or a rehearing.”  The §6214 power to redetermine a deficiency is simply not hooked into the §6213 timing rule.  

The fourth sentence of §6213 does contain the magic word “jurisdiction.”  But, as I explain in much greater detail in my paper on SSRN, while the word “jurisdiction” does appear in the fourth sentence, it is not there tied to the Court’s power to redetermine a deficiency.  It was added to the Tax Court much, much, later than first sentence and later than the §6214 jurisdictional language.  

3. Statutory Context

 As I explain in my SSRN paper, Congress first gave the Tax Court jurisdiction to redetermine a proposed deficiency in 1924.  It did that in a statute separate from the 90/150 day limitation period.  The codifiers also put that jurisdictional grant in a separate section of the Tax Code, both in the 1939 Code and the 1954 Code.

Much later, in 1954, Congress added to the Tax Court’s jurisdiction the power to enjoin the IRS from assessing or collecting a tax liability when the taxpayer had filed a timely petition.  The codifiers put that injunctive power in the same statute as the 90/150 limitation period and conditioned that power on a timely petition being filed.  But the Tax Court’s jurisdiction to redetermine a deficiency is still in a separate statute.

As applied to the shutdown, that distinction possibly makes a difference.  The IRS computers will automatically set up an assessment if no IRS employee inputs the Transaction Code (TC) indicating that a petition has been filed in the Tax Court.  To account for notification delays, the computers are programmed to wait 110 days after the NOD date before setting up the assessment.  Readers should understand that assessments are made in bulk.  Each week, all the assessments that are ready to be made are aggregated into a single document that is signed, either physically or electronically, by a designated official and, hey presto, all of the taxpayers who were set up for that week are now assessed.

The problem in the shutdown is that the IRS computers keep counting the shutdown days as part of the 110 days.  So if and when the Tax Court decides that a petition ostensibly filed 140 days late is actually timely, whether under a narrow or broad reading of Guralnik or under equitable principles, the question arises as to what to do about that assessment.  The IRS should abate the assessment as §6404 authorizes when an assessment “is erroneously or illegally assessed.” 

4. Judicial Context

 This is the only factor that supports reading §6213 as jurisdictional.  But it’s not especially strong because it consists only of lower court precedent that relies on other lower court precedent.  As I explained in Part II, the Supreme Court has not hesitated to scrub even long-standing lower court precedent when it believes the new thinking requires a different result.  The only judicial context that counts for the Supremes is their own former opinions!      

Still, there is plenty of lower court precedent holding that §6213 is jurisdictional.  First, the most recent Tax Court case to express an opinion about §6213 was—you guessed it— Guralnik.  That was in 2016.  But the Court in Gurlanik chose to look exclusively at only this factor and gave no analysis on the other four factors, saying:

In cases too numerous to mention, dating back to 1924, we have held that the statutorily-prescribed filing period in deficiency cases is jurisdictional. See, e.g., Satovsky v. Commissioner, 1 B.T.A. 22, 24 (1924); Block v. Commissioner, 2 T.C. 761, 762 (1943). Even if the “equitable tolling” argument advanced by petitioner and amicus curiae were otherwise persuasive, which it is not, we would decline to adopt that argument solely on grounds of stare decisis.

The error here is in relying on old thinking.  As I explained in Part II and also in my paper, the Supreme Court keeps emphasizing that courts should not rely solely on precedent developed under the old thinking.  In particular, my paper looks at both the cases cited by Guralnik here and not only shows how neither is particularly useful but also discovers that the Tax Court itself no longer follows Block’s rationale on how to count jurisdictional time periods!   

The most recent Circuit Court opinion of note is Tilden v. Commissioner, 846 F.3d 882 (7th Cir. 2017).  There, Judge Easterbrook gave two reasons for holding that §6213 was jurisdictional.  First, he swooned over the magic word “jurisdiction” in §6213 and totally ignored how it related, or did not relate, to the 90/150 time period.  Second, he relied on—wait for it—wait for it—Guralnik!

For many decades the Tax Court and multiple courts of appeals have deemed § 6213(a) as a whole to be a jurisdictional limit on the Tax Court’s adjudicatory competence. [String cite omitted]. We think that it would be imprudent to reject that body of precedent, which places the Tax Court and the Court of Federal Claims, two Article I tribunals, on an equal footing. So we accept Guralnik’s conclusion and treat the statutory filing deadline as a jurisdictional one.

What is especially sad here is that the string cite that I omitted from the quote does not contain a single case after 1995.  Nor could it.  There is not a single court case—much less one from the Supreme Court—that actually analyzes §6213 under the Supreme Court’s new thinking and applies all the factors.   

5. Legislative Context

The legislative context of §6213(a) also supports reading the provision as a claims-processing rule and not as a jurisdictional requirement.  The legislative context is very similar to that which the Supreme Court found so important in Henderson v. Shinseki, 562 U.S. 428 (2011) discussed in Part II.  In brief, Congress created the original Board of Tax Appeals to give taxpayers a theretofore unavailable judicial remedy.  The legislation creating the BTA was manifestly remedial.   

The remedial nature of deficiency proceedings has been long recognized by the Supreme Court.  I think Helvering v. Taylor, 293 U.S. 507 (1935) is particularly instructive.  There, the taxpayers proved that the Notice of Deficiency contained significant error.  The government argued that taxpayers had to not just show the NOD was wrong but also had to prove up their correct tax.  The Supreme Court responded this way: “The rule for which the Commissioner here contends is not consonant with the great remedial purposes of the legislation creating the Board of Tax Appeals.”

The Tax Court itself has used the remedial nature of deficiency proceedings to soften the effect of its continued holding that §6213 is jurisdictional.  In effect, the Tax Court “cheats” on applying §6213 by choosing from among multiple starting dates to help taxpayers meet the 90 day requirement.  It does so because it recognizes the legislative context of the deadline.  I explain this in my article Equitable Principles and Jurisdictional Time Periods, Part II, 159 Tax Notes 1581 (free download here).

It would be no stretch at all for the Tax Court to apply that precedent to an analysis of whether §6213 is jurisdictional in the first place.  

Under the new thinking, then, four of the five factors point towards reading §6213 as a claims processing rule and not a jurisdictional rule.