Phone Tax Challenge Reinstated

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that taxpayers could challenge under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) the IRS’ method of refunding long-distance telephone excise taxes.

The 2-1 decision in Neiland Cohen v. U.S. reversed and remanded a dismissal of the case by the District Court for the District of Columbia. The appellate court’s opinion by Judge Janice Rogers Brown sharply criticized the IRS’ position as “mean,” demonstrating “chutzpah” and demanding “clairvoyance” of taxpayers. The case had been consolidated with two others.

The 3% excise tax on phone service under IRC § 4251 had been contested by a number of taxpayers with respect to toll calls. IRC § 4252(b) defines taxable service as including long-distance calls for which the charge varies with time and distance or is billed by a flat fee for calls within a specified nonlocal area. However, taxpayers argued, because of changes in telecommunications, distance-related charges no longer applied in most cases. After several circuit courts had ruled against the IRS, the Service in Notice 2006-50 announced it would stop collecting the tax on charges based solely on transmission time and provided a procedure for refunds. Taxpayers could claim refunds on their 2006 income tax returns for either actual taxes paid from 2003 to 2006 or a safe harbor amount (for individual taxpayers, between $30 and $60, depending on the number of exemptions).

The district court ruled that Cohen had not met the requirements of section 7422, which generally bars any refund suit until an administrative claim has been filed. On appeal, Cohen argued that the refund scheme violated the APA, which is codified under Title 5 of the U.S. Code starting at section 500. It allows courts to setaside federal agency actions that are “arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with the law” (5 USC § 706(2)(A)). Notice 2006-50 could be reviewed under the APA because it was a final agency action resulting from IRS deliberations and altered the legal rights or obligations of the Service, tax collectors and taxpayers, the appellate court said. As such, it constituted more than a mere statement of policy under which the IRS exercised discretion, as the Service had argued, particularly since it amounted to an admission that the taxes had been illegally collected, the court said.

As for the Service’s argument that taxpayers were not required to follow the notice to file suit, “that’s just mean,” Brown wrote, citing a “virtual house of mirrors” of contradictory form instructions. Likewise, she wrote, filing an informal claim to satisfy the statutory requirement, as the district court had suggested, would likely have ended in frustration.

“Despite the obvious infirmities of these options, the IRS still has the chutzpah to chide taxpayers for failing to intuit that neither the agency’s express instructions nor the warning on its forms should be taken seriously. … Taxpayers bear a heavy burden when pursuing refund claims, but we have yet to demand clairvoyance,” she wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh acknowledged the plaintiffs’ complaints that they were undercompensated by the refund scheme. However, they did not properly seek refunds within that scheme. Nor did they fulfill the administrative exhaustion requirements of section 7422(a) and provisions reinforcing it that were rejected by the majority but have been repeatedly upheld by the courts, he said. The latter include the Anti-Injunction Act of IRC § 7421(a) (“no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court”) and 28 USC § 2201(a), which excepts most federal tax actions from federal courts’ power to grant declaratory relief.

“The question here concerns only the timing of judicial review, not the availability of judicial review,” Kavanaugh wrote.

A timing issue did prompt the majority to uphold the district court’s dismissal of Cohen’s refund claim because he had not waited for a determination for six months after filing it administratively, as required by IRC § 6532.

By Tax Matters editor Paul Bonner.