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How the Death of a President Impacts Tax Court Jurisdiction

Posted on Feb. 26, 2020

The ever alert commenter-in-chief and occasional guest blogger, Bob Kamman, brought to my attention a Tax Court order issued on February 21, 2019, as a result of the death of President George H. W. Bush in 2018. It seems that the petitioner in the case, Ms. Makowski, went to the post office on December 5, 2018, the 90th day to mail her petition to the Tax Court. When she arrived at the post office, it was closed because President Trump had ordered December 5, 2018 to be a day of national mourning for President Bush. So, Ms. Makowski had to come back to the post office the next day to mail her petition. When her petition arrived at the Tax Court, the IRS noticed that it was mailed one day late and filed a motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.

Ms. Makowski responded to the motion by sending the court a letter explaining the problem she had in trying to mail the letter on the 90th day. The court then issued the following order:

On February 21, 2019, respondent filed in the above-docketed case a Motion To Dismiss for Lack of Jurisdiction, on the ground that the petition herein was not filed within the time prescribed by section 6213(a) or 7502 of the Internal Revenue Code. Respondent attached to the motion copies of a notice of deficiency and corresponding certified mail list, as evidence of the fact that such notice for the taxable years 2015 and 2016 was sent to petitioner by certified mail on September 6, 2018. On March 26, 2019, the Court received from petitioner a document, initially filed as a letter, that is in the nature of an objection to the motion to dismiss. Therein, petitioner explained, and attached documentation supporting, that she had been unable to mail the petition on the December 5, 2018, due date because of the closure of post offices concomitant with the declaration by President Donald Trump of a National Day of Mourning in honor of former President George H.W. Bush.

Upon due consideration, it is ORDERED that petitioner’s submission filed March 26, 2018, [sic] as a letter shall be recharacterized as an objection to the pending motion to dismiss.

It is further ORDERED that, on or before April 18, 2019, respondent shall file a response to petitioner’s just-referenced objection, addressing the impact of the National Day of Mourning declaration for purposes of filing deadlines.

The IRS withdrew its motion because of the Tax Court’s decision in Guralnik. The case moved forward to decision where the IRS conceded that she had no deficiency for the two years at issue. Happy ending.

The case demonstrates another way that the shutdown of the overall federal government (think budget impasse as discussed here) or the Tax Court (think snow as discussed here) can impact a taxpayer’s ability to obtain Tax Court jurisdiction or at least to have a petition deemed timely filed, so that the petitioner need not get into the arguments about whether timely filing creates a jurisdictional issue.

It’s a fairly simple lesson at this point, but the issue of government shutdown resulting from the death of a President reminded me of a problem caused by the death of President Nixon in April of 1994. This remembrance has absolutely nothing to do with tax procedure so stop reading if you are looking for any meaning here.

At the time of President Nixon’s death, I was the District Counsel for the IRS in Richmond, Virginia which meant I was in charge of the group of attorneys representing the IRS in Virginia. One of the attorneys in the office was going to a training program in Boulder, Colorado. As I remember, the program ran from Tuesday morning through Thursday afternoon with Monday and Friday as travel days. The attorney liked to ski and decided to go to Colorado early in order to get in some skiing over the weekend. The flight cost to the government was the same, and he picked up his expenses for the time before the training program began.

After he left Richmond and before the training program began, the government announced that Wednesday of the week of the training program would be a day of national mourning for President Nixon. That caused the office to cancel the training program since it could not be held on Wednesday and that created a big hole in the programming. By the time of the decision, the attorney was already on the slopes. This was an era before cell phones and other forms of instant communication, so I called the ski resort and asked it to leave a message on its message board for the attorney to call me. That failed. I called the hotel in Boulder where he was going to stay and did connect with him once he arrived there. He returned to Richmond after receiving the message at the hotel, and we began the process of putting in a travel voucher for a trip to a training program that was cancelled.

Many memos and phone calls later, the government did cover the cost of his airfare and one night’s lodging, but the exercise forever burned in my memory the fact that the government shuts down when a President dies, even though the consequences of the shutdown can be unexpected. As bad as it seemed when I was writing and calling on behalf of the employee to obtain his reimbursement, I remember that my counterpart in Chicago had an employee who had a fear of flying and took the train from Chicago to Colorado to attend the training. So, I was not the only one with this headache.

Shutting down the government creates many ripples.  If you have a Tax Court matter with a due date on the shutdown, keep Guralnik in mind.  This is yet another situation where it can come in handy.

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