We are starting to see some fallout from last month’s CIC Services opinion. For example, Tax Notes’ Kristen Parillo discusses[$] Hancock Land Acquisitions v US , another microcaptive case. Parillo’s article explores the parties’ post CIC Services supplemental filings in a case where the taxpayer brought an action alleging that the IRS’s failure to refer its case to Appeals violated the Taxpayer First Act’s addition of Section 7803(e)(4) and its mandate that Appeals’ “shall be generally available to all taxpayers.” Immediately following the Supreme Court opinion, the government filed a supplemental brief claiming that CIC does not alter that the challenge is barred by the AIA, emphasizing that the partnership was not challenging a reporting obligation and that the relief requested was close to an assessment on the partners.
read more…The partnership responded, claiming that its challenge squarely fits in with the three CIC factors that led the Court to conclude that the challenge was not to a tax, including that its relief looks to a remedy for alleged violations of their procedural rights and that any impact on assessment or collection is just a downstream consequence.
Earlier this week there was also a very interesting blog post on CIC Services in Notice & Comment, the administrative law blog. The post, Do you C what I C? – CIC Services v. IRS and Remedies Under the APA, from Professor Mila Sohoni, explores what CIC Services offers more broadly for admin law purposes:
The Court’s opinion in CIC Services throws some much-needed light on two important points of contention within that debate: what do litigants mean when they ask a court to “enjoin” a rule or “declare” a rule “unlawful” in an APA action, and what does the APA mean when it says that a court may “hold unlawful and set aside” a rule?
For readers interested in those issues I suggest reading the brief but powerful post. The post focuses mostly on APA 706 and whether APA violations can lead to vacating regs/rules in their entirety or rather a more narrow focus on the individual plaintiff. The takeaway from the post is that there has been some uncertainty in admin law circles on the scope of a federal court’s powers when in a preenforcement action it finds that an agency (not just the IRS) violates the APA. As Sohoni discusses the Sessions led DOJ in the Trump Administration issued litigation guidelines that adopted the narrow view. Others have argued that the courts have much broader powers to enjoin agency action. Sohoni argues forcefully that CIC Services provides support for the latter view:
The opinion in CIC Services shows that the Court does not hold this [the narrow] view of the meaning of “set aside.” Throughout its opinion, the Court treats “set aside” as a type of relief. (See, e.g., CIC Servs., slip op. at 4-5 (“So the complaint asks the court to ‘set[] aside IRS Notice 2016-66 …’”); id. at 11 (“the existence of criminal penalties explains why an entity like CIC must bring an action in just this form, framing its requested relief in just this way”). Moreover, the Court not only treats “set aside” as a kind of relief, but the Court also necessarily is using the term “set aside” in its conventional sense: to mean “invalidate,” not merely to “ignore.”
These developments are just the opening rounds on the impact of CIC Services. Stay tuned.
About Leslie Book
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