On March 28, I wrote a post about an innocent spouse/injured spouse case, Palomares v. Commissioner, pending before the 9th Circuit. The case has been argued and the oral argument is available here for those who have an interest in this issue.
On May 23, I wrote a post about a fully stipulated collection due process case, Low v. Commissioner, in which the Court remanded the case because the stipulation was incomplete. Counsel for the petitioner commented on the case and has provided access to certain documents in that case for those with further interest. The first stipulation of facts, the briefs, and the briefs in a related case are available through these links.
On May 18, Les wrote a post about the statute of limitations where the taxpayer failed to file the correct form with the IRS, May v. United States. We received a lengthy and thoughtful comment about the matter from occasional guest blogger Stu Bassin. For those interested in this case, we recommend reading his comment.
We bring this up occasionally but the people providing comments on the blog post bring up many relevant insights about the matters on which we post. If you are not regularly reading the comments or at least looking for comments on posts of interest to you, you are missing some important information. Thank you again to those of you who take the time to comment for your thoughtful insights on the posts. Please remember if you make a comment that we do request that you identify yourself because we find that self- identification keeps the comments more civil in tone. We hope that you find the blog provides civil discourse about tax procedure issues and that the comments continue that civil discourse about important tax procedure issues.
In addition to soliciting your comments, we also welcome guest bloggers. If there is a tax procedure issue about which you would like to write a blog post for our site, please contact one of us with your idea or your post.
In Palomares the taxpayer filed the wrong form with the IRS. At oral argument one of the 9th Circuit judges asks counsel for Petitioner if the IRS had a legal obligation to explain the procedural error that the taxpayer made and what they should do to make a proper refund claim. Counsel replies that there is no such obligation. The tax year involved in Palomares is 1996. While the IRS did not adopt the Taxpayer Bill of Rights until 2014 and it didn’t become part of the IRC until December 18, 2015, I hope the answer to this question in the future will be a strong “yes” citing both the Right to be Informed and the Right to Quality Service.
If TBOR is to have any teeth the Courts are going to have to fashion a remedy for violations by the IRS. At the LITC in San Diego we are considering filing suit in Federal District Court over a TBOR violation. In our case the violation that took place is clear. The problem is finding a meaningful remedy.