Eleventh Circuit Upholds Enforcement of Summons Relating to Law Firm and Its Clients (And Sweeps in the 1980 Miracle on Ice)

Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Rosenbaum contrasts the uphill battle that the US hockey team faced from the battle that the plaintiffs faced:

But forget about tough odds the U.S. hockey team faced, Plaintiffs face-off with something even more formidable…

According to the opinion, more formidable than the Soviet team is the considerable power that the IRS has to get information via its summons powers. The opinion nicely summarizes the statutory framework and Supreme Court guidance that stack the deck heavily in favor of the IRS.

The facts are straightforward. The plaintiffs are a lawyer and his law firm, and they sought court protection to avoid their bank’s compliance with summonses the IRS issued in connection with an exam of Presley’s individual income tax liability.

As the opinion discusses the IRS summonses sought records “pertaining to any and all accounts over which [each Plaintiff] has signature authority,” including bank statements, loan proceeds, deposit slips, records of purchase, sources for all deposited items, and copies of all checks drawn.

Presley objected to the bank’s turning over information related to their clients’ trust and escrow accounts, arguing essentially that his clients’ Fourth Amendment expectation of privacy would be violated if the IRS obtained the information about the clients’ financial transactions with the law firm.

The opinion starts by describing that there is some uncertainty whether the law firm, rather than the clients, can make the Fourth Amendment argument. After all, it is the clients whose privacy interests are at stake. This is akin to a standing dispute; i.e., does the law firm have standing to make the case that its clients’ privacy interests may be violated?

The opinion is able to sidestep that issue, noting that unlike traditional Article III standing disputes, Fourth Amendment standing is not jurisdictional, meaning that the opinion can effectively decide the matter on the merits without weighing in on whether technically Presley can in fact make the argument.

Getting to the merits, Presley argued that in light of the clients’ privacy interests in the financial information the IRS must show probable cause to enforce the summons. The court disagreed, noting that probable cause would only be required if the clients had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the financial records.  The opinion says that there is no such expectation, referring to what is known as the third-party doctrine and citing to the 1976 Supreme Court case US v Miller (also involving an IRS summons and a bank):

[A] party lacks a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in information “revealed to a third party and conveyed by [that third party] to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.”

Presley tried to distinguish Miller, because unlike in that case, there was an intermediary between the clients and the bank, i.e., the clients transferred money to the law firm, which then made deposits on behalf of the clients. The court found that distinction insignificant:

Nor does it matter that Plaintiffs’ clients gave their records to Plaintiffs rather than directly to the bank. Plaintiffs conveyed their records, such as checks for deposit in Presley Law’s escrow or trust accounts, knowing that the firm would, in turn, deposit these items with the Bank. So if Plaintiffs cannot escape Miller directly, Plaintiffs’ clients cannot avoid its application indirectly. In short, Miller precludes us from holding that Plaintiffs’ clients have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the summoned records.

There were two other issues of note in the opinion. Presley also argued that even if there was no Fourth Amendment requirement that the government show probable cause to ensure enforcement, the Florida constitution had a heightened privacy protection for these circumstances. The Eleventh Circuit declined to consider the impact of the Florida constitution on the reach of IRS summons powers, noting that state laws that “conflict with federal laws by impeding the ‘full purposes’ of Congress must give way as preempted,” a doctrine known as the Supremacy Clause. That has come up before in tax cases, as courts have enforced IRS summonses despite, for example, state law doctor-patient privileges.

Once dispelling with the argument that the IRS had to establish heightened probable cause to justify the summonses, the opinion rested on a traditional application of the Powell factors, which in effect is a proxy for the Fourth Amendment protection that an IRS search met the lesser standard that it not be unreasonable. Noting that Presley did not claim a conflict with Powell, and that there was no claim that the IRS was using the summons power as a subterfuge to investigate the clients or violate attorney-client privilege, the opinion found “no reason to discern why the summons should not be enforced.”

As a final argument, Presley argued that the district court failed to comply with the so-called John Doe summons procedures under Section 7609(f). That requires the IRS to go to a district court in an ex parte hearing when it seeks information about unnamed third parties. We have discussed that a few times in PT, and I discuss it heavily in Chapter 13 of Saltzman and Book, including in the context of the IRS investigation of crypto currency users.

Here, while the IRS sought information that included information about unnamed third parties (the clients), the main targets were the law firm and Presley himself, who were named on the summons and who did receive notice of the IRS actions. Moreover, the plaintiffs in Presley conceded that their clients were not the subject of the IRS investigation, unlike in the Bitcoin dispute where IRS has been trying to gather information to allow it to determine whether Bitcoin customers were complying with federal tax laws.

For good measure, additional Supreme Court precedent, Tiffany v US, allows the IRS to effectively issue dual purpose summonses that could also provide information about unnamed third parties, provided that the IRS complies with the notice provisions under Section 7609(a)—which it did here.

Taken together, the defenses that the government mustered were more formidable than Vladislav Tretiak, and the bank will have no choice but to comply with the summons and I doubt there will be a Disney movie about this story.