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Tax Court Preparing to Receive Mail Again

Posted on June 23, 2020

The Tax Court announced that it will resume receiving mail on July 10, although it isn’t clear yet what effect that will have on petition filing deadlines.

A June 19 announcement states that while the court will start receiving mail, its building “remains closed to the public, and until further notice, documents may not be hand-delivered.”

The court says it expects to receive the mail already in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service and private delivery services like UPS and FedEx on July 10. Earlier this month, a judge spoke of a rumor that a truckload and a half of mail awaits the court.

The court has been unable to receive filings in the mail since its closure in March. Because all petitions still must be filed with paper copies, the court extended all petition filing deadlines until it reopens under Guralnik v. Commissioner, 146 T.C. 230 (2016). The IRS also exercised its disaster relief authority to extend those due dates until at least July 15.

In Guralnik, the Tax Court held that the final day of a petition filing deadline can’t fall on a day when the court clerk’s office is inaccessible. The court’s announcement of its closure stated that Guralnik would apply while it’s closed. The court’s rule both extends petition deadlines that would have predated the IRS’s April 1 to July 15 rule and could apply after the April 1 to July 15 rule’s expiration.

Carlton Smith, former director of the tax clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, pointed out that the announcement “says nothing about when the clerk’s office will reopen, which is the key date for purposes of Guralnik.”

T. Keith Fogg, director of the Harvard Law School Federal Tax Clinic, said he wishes the announcement had been clearer, noting that it wouldn’t be surprising to see litigation over the announcement’s interaction with Guralnik. Either the IRS could assert that the announcement signals the accessibility of the clerk’s office or the court could raise the issue when policing its jurisdiction, he said.

The safest thing for any petitioner or practitioner to do would be to file petitions that otherwise would have been due earlier in the year before July 15, or before the normal 30- or 90-day filing deadlines for more recent IRS notices, Fogg said.

The court had no further comment when Tax Notes requested clarification on the matter. A Tax Court spokesperson previously said the court will post an announcement on its website about reopening its building and mailing address as early as possible.

The Tax Court is creating guidelines that will allow electronic filing of petitions, a process that won’t moot the application of Guralnik but could shift the closure concerns from the court’s physical office to the accessibility of the electronic filing system.

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