Tax Procedure Book Errata - Correct Status of the Tax Court (1/2/17)

Book Outline Section	Nature of Update	Location for current editions
Ch. 2 III.B.2. Article I Courts	Correct the status of the Tax Court as an Article I court independent of the judicial system subject to Article III and independent of the executive branch.  Prior to this change, the text in the current version indicated that the Tax Court was within the executive branch of Government.  It is not.  An error that should have been corrected previously.	Student Ed. P. 70 Practitioner Ed. p. 101

Change the paragraph on the United States Tax Court to read as follows:

               The United States Tax Court is an Article I court independent of the Article III judicial system and independent of the executive branch.  § 7441.  n339 The Tax Court has jurisdiction over tax related claims only.  Generally, the Tax Court has jurisdiction to redetermine deficiencies proposed by the IRS and resolve certain other disputes with the IRS. The Tax Court is the principal court in which tax controversies are litigated.
   n339 See Burns, Stix Friedman & Co. v. Commissioner, 57 T.C. 392, 395 (1971); and Freytag v. Commissioner, 501 U.S. 868, 890-892 (1991. In 2015, in response to the Kuretski case (cited below in the footnote), Congress added this sentence to § 7441: “The Tax Court is not an agency of, and shall be independent of, the executive branch of the Government;” that sentence codifies a clause from Freytag v. Commissioner, p. 891 “[t]he Tax Court remains independent of the Executive * * * Branch[es].” The President does have the power to power to remove Tax Court judges “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”  § 7443(f).  Two key cases have held that the President’s limited power to remove Tax Court judges does not violate separation of powers principles (although the two cases reach the conclusion for different reasons).  Battat v. Commissioner, 148 T.C. ___, No. 2 (2017) (holding that the interbranch removal power did not implicate Article III because the Tax Court does not exercise Article III judicial power; Battat also has a good discussion of the history of the Tax Court from its inception as the Board of Tax Appeals to its current status); and Kuretski v. Commissioner, 755 F.3d 929 (D.C. Cir. 2014) (holding before the amendment noted above, that the Tax Court was an executive branch court that could permissibly be subject to Presidential removal); see also Byers v. United States Tax Court, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 135596 (D. D.C. 2016) (holding that the Tax Court is a court exempt from FOIA and containing a good discussion of the status of the Tax Court).  See also Brant J. Hellwig, The Constitutional Nature of the United States Tax Court, 35 Va. Tax Rev. 269 (2015).