Tax Court Holds that § 6213(a) Time Deadline for Petitions for Redetermination Is Jurisdictional, Thus Not Subject to Equitable Relief (12/13/22)

I have not yet written on Hallmark Research Collective v. Commissioner, 159 T.C. 126 (2022)  (unanimous reviewed opinion), TCPamphlet here & GS here.

The holding is that the § 6213(a) 90-day / 150-day period for petitions to redetermine deficiencies is jurisdictional, meaning that there is no equitable relief to file out-of-time petitions. I won’t analyze the holding because the opinion speaks for itself and makes, perhaps, the best case for the holding. (That is not a statement that it is a correct holding.) The issue was whether § 6213(a) was subject to the recent trend to treat time statutory time deadlines as claims processing rules rather than jurisdictional requirements (meaning must be met). The most relevant and recent iteration is Boechler, P.C. v. Commissioner, 142 S. Ct. 1493 (2022), where the Court held that the § 6330(d)(1) 30-day CDP deadline was not jurisdictional, thus subject to equitable relief.

Readers interested in this area of law have already seen several, perhaps many, comments on the Hallmark holding. I don’t think I have anything to add to those commentaries. Perhaps the longest and strongest criticism of the Hallmark opinion is in a series of posts by Carl Smith on the Procedurally Taxing Blog titled What’s Wrong with the Tax Court’s Hallmark Opinion: Part 1 ….., here (I think there are more Parts to come, but the link is a search link and should pick up the later Parts). 

I am agnostic as to the resolution of the issue of whether the § 6213(a) deadline must be met (jurisdictional) or not (claims processing subject to equitable relief). However, I do note that there are some consequences if that particular deadline is deemed to be claims processing rather than jurisdictional that should be considered given the collateral provisions (such as statute of limitations suspension while the taxpayer can file a petition, etc.); I am not sure they have been fully dealt with in the Hallmark opinion, perhaps because the Court held that the deadline was jurisdictional; still they should be considered as perhaps reasons that the deadline must be jurisdictional in order to make the parts of the superstructure work.

I do have two anecdotes to share on reviewed opinions.  First, in at least one other prominent unanimous reviewed Tax Court opinion, the Court of Appeals reversed despite unanimity of the "expert" Tax Court judges.  Altera Corp. v. Commissioner, 145 T.C. 91, 116 (2015), rev’d 926 F.3d 1061 (9th Cir. 2019), reh. en banc den. 941 F.3d 1200 (9th Cir. 2019), cert. denied, 591 U.S. ___, 141 S.Ct. 131 (2020).  Second, I contrast that with my personal anecdote in an appellate case I handled while with DOJ Tax in a government appeal from a reviewed Tax Court opinion where upon learning that the split in the Tax Court was 12 and 4, the court of appeals presiding panel judge declared well that's pretty much it, with the affirmance issuing shortly thereafter.  (I recount this anecdote at the end of the following blog:  Developments - Federal Tax Procedure Book 2018 Editions and Altera (Federal Tax Procedure Blog 7/25/18; 7/27/18), here.

The lesson is, I suppose, that the amount of deference appellate judges give to Tax Court reviewed opinions varies.

Note regarding corrected opinion: I have attempted via MS Word to cut and paste the contents of the respective pdfs of the original and corrected opinions and then compare them, but it was a messy process; the process did not highlight any material changes, still I recommend that readers read the corrected copy linked above. As a related aside, I wrote a letter to the Tax Court recommending that the Court provide a way to determine corrections to opinions (such as the Supreme Court does). See My Suggestions to Tax Court on Procedure Related Matters (Federal Tax Procedure Blog 11/23/20), here, at par. 2. The Tax Court never responded to my letter, and I had to confirm from unofficial sources that it had received the letter; the Tax Court has subsequently published its Citation and Style Guide, here. That Guide is not as robust as the Supreme Court Style Guide, here.