Welcome back to second of this three-part installment of “Making All Your Arguments in Collection Due Process Cases.” In Part One, we looked at a threshold question of when you are entitled to even raise certain arguments to begin with. The statute (IRC § 6330) precludes taxpayers from getting “two bites at the apple” in certain circumstances. These include arguing the underlying tax if you received a Notice of Deficiency or otherwise had an opportunity to argue the tax (IRC § 6330(c)(2)(B)). Note that while you do not have the right argue the underlying liability in those circumstances, you still can raise the issue and hope that the IRS Appeals officer decides to address it. See Treas. Reg. § 301.6330-1(e)(3)(A-E11). But it is in the “sole-discretion” of IRS Appeals whether to consider the issue in that case, and the decision (so the Treasury says) is not reviewable by the Tax Court.
Today, instead of relying on the goodness of the IRS Appeals Officer’s heart, we’ll dive into issues that the taxpayer almost always has the right to raise.
Issue Two: The IRS Screwed Up (Procedurally) In Assessing the Tax (Mirken v. C.I.R., Dkt. # 18972-17L (here))
In a Collection Due Process hearing, if you focus on issues in the tax process the Tax Court will usually hear them out (go figure). If it was even remotely catchy, I’d suggest the following mnemonic device: In CDP, Subtitle F Gets You A’s and Subtitle A Gets You F’s. Feel free to never, ever think of that phrase again.
The Mirken order highlights the importance of CDP as a way to check the processes in assessment and collection. It also is worth giving Judge Copeland kudos for ensuring that justice is done where the pro se taxpayers may not have used the precise tax jargon a practitioner would.
As noted before, if you don’t raise issues in your petition you run the risk of conceding them. Sometimes you have a way out by arguing that the issues were tried by consent under Rule 41(b), but you don’t want to have to rely on this. You also need to allege facts supporting your assignments of error if you are the party with the burden of proof on them. On the rare occasion that you (petitioner) don’t have the burden of proof, you only need to raise the issue.
In CDP, one area where the IRS has the burden of proof is in verifying that all applicable law or administrative procedures have been met (IRC § 6330(c)(1)). Note again that you still have to raise that issue in your petition in the first place. Here, the unrepresented taxpayers did not raise this issue in their petition, but arguably did in their objection to the IRS’s summary judgment motion. Judge Copeland finds this to be sufficient to amend the pleadings under Rule 41(a), and then takes a look at the IRS’s records on the issue.
As is so often the case, the IRS records do not inspire confidence. A testament (again) to putting IRS records at issue at.
There are three assessments leading to liabilities here: (1) taxes assessed on the original return, (2) assessable penalties relating to the original return, and (3) taxes assessed through the deficiency procedures -in this case through the IRS Automated Under Reporter (AUR) program. In the Notice of Determination, the IRS Settlement Officer stated that she had “verified through transcript analysis that the assessment was properly made per [section] 6201 for each tax[.]”
This is something of a twist on the usual boilerplate I receive in my Notice of Determinations, which are extraordinarily unhelpful and usually just say, “I have verified that all procedures were met.” But even this twist (referring to transcript analysis and an actual code section!) won’t save the IRS. Being slightly more specific isn’t enough for the Tax Court to simply “trust” the determination.
For one, Judge Copeland notes that the taxes assessed under the deficiency procedures would not be assessed under IRC § 6201, but rather the deficiency proceedings (see IRC § 6201(e)). The most important component of deficiency proceedings is the Notice of Deficiency (again, go figure). With regards to the Notice of Deficiency, validity depends on the taxpayer actually receiving the notice with time to petition the court or the notice being properly mailed to the taxpayer’s “last known address” even absent actual receipt. See IRC § 6212(b).
There does not appear to be a record of the IRS Settlement Officer looking up if or where the Notice of Deficiency was mailed. In fact, as Judge Copeland notes, it doesn’t appear that the Settlement Officer knows what the taxpayers “last known address” would even be in determining the validity of a Notice of Deficiency. Should we just trust that the IRS did it right?
No, we should not. Especially not on a summary judgment motion from the IRS. And especially not when, as in this case, the Settlement Officer already sent a letter to the petitioners at the wrong address for this hearing.
Accordingly, Judge Copeland has no problem finding there to be a “genuine issue of material fact” that precludes summary judgment. And that is surely the correct outcome.
But before ending the lessons of Mirken I want to bring practitioners back to a threshold problem, and something I began this post on: raising issues in your petition. Frequently, in my experience, at a CDP hearing you are really only discussing the appropriateness of collection alternatives. A best practice would be to raise the procedural issues of assessment in the hearing, but when that doesn’t happen is it still acceptable to assign error to it in a petition? Can you do that under Tax Court Rule 33 when you don’t actually have a concrete reason (just general history and skepticism) to question that the IRS properly followed procedures?
I have two thoughts on that. My first thought is to amend the petition after getting the admin file. Hopefully that will happen soon enough that you can amend as is a matter of right, but often I doubt that will be the case. Fortunately, even if it takes a while to receive the administrative file my bet is that the Tax Court would freely allow an amended pleading if you are only able to learn of the problem later (I also doubt most IRS attorneys would object in those circumstances).
My second thought is that your standard practice should always be to request the administrative file as it exists in advance of the hearing. It is always a good idea to have as full a picture as possible on what information the IRS is working off. But beyond that, because of the Taxpayer First Act, you have a statutory right to the admin file in conferences with Appeals (see IRC § 7803(e)(7)(A)).
The most recent letters from Appeals I have received setting CDP hearings have specifically referenced the right of the taxpayer to request the file. It is always wrong (and not even an “abuse of discretion”) for the IRS not to follow a statute, and failure to send information you are legally entitled to certainly could be part of a Tax Court CDP petition. This isn’t an attempt to “set a trap” for IRS Appeals, but information that would be critically important for us to raise all potential issues at the CDP hearing. I know that I’ve made such requests to IRS Appeals and am still waiting…