Supreme Court Grants Cert on Issue of Whether CDP 30-day Time Limit is Jurisdictional (9/30/21)

The Supreme Court granted the petition for writ of certiorari in Boechler v. Commissioner, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 23306 (8^th Cir. 2020) to consider the following question:

Whether the time limit in Section 6330(d)(1) is a jurisdictional requirement or a claim processing rule subject to equitable tolling.

The Procedurally Taxing Blog has a good discussion on the grant of cert:  Christine Speidel, Supreme Court Agrees to Decide Whether the CDP Petition Filing Deadline Is Jurisdictional (Procedurally Taxing Blog 9/30/21), here.

There are other time limits in the IRC for the taxpayers and the IRS to act.  The quintessential time limit is the 90-day period for filing a petition for redetermination of a deficiency.  That has always been deemed jurisdictional, meaning that a taxpayer either complies with it or does not; there is no equitable relief for failure to file in the time period.  Another quintessential time limit is for filing a claim for refund, which the Court held in United States v. Brockamp, 519 U.S. 347 (1997) did not permit equitable tolling.  Congress thereafter enacted § 6511(h), here, to permit some equitable factors to toll the refund claim time period requirement.

Two reasonable inferences from Brockamp and § 6511(h) are:

• Some time periods in the IRC are jurisdictional in the sense that equitable tolling is not permitted.
• When Congress wants time periods, particularly those required for orderly functioning of the ubiquitous tax system, to be subject to equitable tolling, it provides specifically for that relief.

In this context, the § 6330(d)(1) time limitation is hard to distinguish between the petition for redetermination and claim for refund time periods.

IRS Disclosures of Knowingly False Return Information is Subject to Civil Action for Wrongful Disclosure (11/24/12)

In Aloe Vera of America, Inc. v. United States, 699 F.3d 1153 (9th Cir. 2012), here, the Ninth Circuit addressed the application of the two year time limit for filing a suit for wrongful disclosure of return information.  Section 6103, here, titled Confidentiality and disclosure of returns and return information, generally requires that return information -- virtually everything the IRS knows about a taxpayer -- be confidential, with certain specified exceptions.  Section 7431, here, titled Civil damages for unauthorized inspection or disclosure of returns or return information, provides a taxpayer a civil remedy the IRS's disclosures of return information not authorized by Section 6103.  Section 7431(d) provides that the suit must be brought "within 2 years after the date of discovery by the plaintiff of the unauthorized inspection or disclosure."  The question addressed by the Ninth Circuit was when the limitations period begins.

The Court (with Judge Sidney R. Thomas, here, as author of the majority opinion) starts its exegesis with a crisp statement of the issue and the holding:

This appeal presents the question, among others, of what event triggers the running of the statute of limitations for a claim for wrongful disclosure of a tax return pursuant to 26 U.S.C. § 7431(d). We conclude that the statute of limitations begins to run when the plaintiff knows or reasonably should know of the government's allegedly unauthorized disclosures. We also conclude, in the circumstances presented by this case, that the statute of limitations did not begin to run when the plaintiffs became aware of a pending general investigation that would involve disclosures, but only later when they knew or should have known of the specific disclosures at issue. Applying these principles to the facts of this case, we affirm in part and reverse in part.