The Tax Dispute Resolution Clinic at Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas is hiring for the upcoming academic year. This is a full-time non-tenure Academic Professional Track faculty position (decanal hire rather than through the usual Appointments process) and would work with the current Director, PT’s own excellent Bob Probasco. They are looking to hire someone who could start this summer, before the beginning of the Fall semester. The job description and application link is here.
In addition to information about the loss of judges and making changes to the Tax Court’s calendars starting in the fall, Chief Judge Kerrigan gave a number of statistics about the Court during the past year. I was writing these down as she spoke and need to caveat that mistakes could have been made in my transcription of her statements. I also mention that the Court runs time frames differently than Chief Counsel and it’s possible that I correctly transcribed what was said but the numbers that appear here will differ from numbers you will see from Chief Counsel, IRS.
In 2022 the Court received 29,000 new petitions. 96% of the petitions sought relief pursuant to the Court’s deficiency jurisdiction.
In 2022 there were 54 in person calendars of the Tax Court taking place around the country and 83 remote calendars. Judge Kerrigan indicated that she expects the Court to continue to change back to in person calendars but that the Court will not wholly abandon remote calendars.
In 2022 the Court issued 215 opinions broken up as 18 division opinions (I would call these precedential opinions); 131 memo opinions; 28 summary opinions (S cases) and 38 bench opinions. The number of opinions is significantly down from historical highs. For a detailed breakdown of court opinions over its years as an Article 1 court see the article by Caitlin Hird and me here. The number of bench opinions has risen. See an article on bench opinions by Tyler Moses and me here. Perhaps the newer judges on the Court have embraced bench opinions in a way that some of the older judges did not. Perhaps the pandemic had an influence. Bench opinions do provide a way for the Court to quickly render the opinion; however, the Court’s rules hinder judges from issuing bench opinions by requiring their issuance prior to the end of the calendar on which the case was heard.
In 2023 the Tax Court is on a pace to exceed it decisional output from last year. At the time of the Tax Section meeting, it had already issued 115 opinions broken down as 11 division opinions, 60 memo opinions, 18 summary opinions and 26 bench opinions. Just because the number of opinions is down sharply from historical highs does not mean that the Court is less productive. It now disposes of a significant number of cases through orders. If you only follow opinions, you miss out on much of the Court’s decision making even though decision making through orders does not create precedent.
Judge Kerrigan said that in 2021 there were 36 limited entries of appearance and in 2022 there were 54. I anticipate this number will continue to grow as practitioners become more comfortable with this tool.
Rich Goldman, Deputy Associate Chief Counsel, Procedure and Administration, spoke on the panel for Chief Counsel’s office as he has done for many years. He foreshadowed the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Tax Court by giving some statistics from the beginning of the Board of Tax Appeals. The BTA began on July 16, 1924. It received 30 petitions in July of 1924. During the month of July 2022, taxpayers filed 2042 petitions. If I heard Rich correctly, he said that the BTA decided 11,000 cases in its first three years. He said that 98% of tax litigation now occurs in the Tax Court.
The IRS issued 1,892,478 notices of deficiency in 2022. Most of these notices came from the Automated Underreporter Unit (AUR) – 1.5 million; 300,000 were issued by Automated Substitute for Return (ASFR) while field exam issued 15,000. (My notes may be inaccurate here because a few hundred thousand statutory notices issue each year from correspondence exam where all of the refundable credits exams take place.)
Rich also spoke about some of the challenges facing Chief Counsel attorneys in answering cases. They have difficulty verifying signatures in joint petitions. He noted that Rule 25 treats ratification of an imperfect petition as restarting the time to file the answer. He displayed some statistics which are available here.