Earlier this summer there were two major circuit court opinions examining the validity of guidance. First, there was Altera v. Commissioner, where the Ninth Circuit again reversed the Tax Court and upheld the validity of regulations under Section 482. The second opinion is CIC Services v IRS. That case generated a little less fanfare than Altera, but it is significant and it highlights fundamental differences in the interpretation of the Anti Injunction Act (AIA). In CIC, the Sixth Circuit found that the AIA barred an APA challenge to an IRS notice that required the reporting of micro captive insurance companies as transactions of interest under Section 6011.
In this post I will discuss the CIC case. We may return to Altera – that case in its multiple permutations remains the most blogged about case on PT; in my read the recent Altera opinion follows the approach of the prior panel, with the majority and dissents authored by the same judges. Jack Townsend’s overview and comments are worth reading, here.
The AIA is codified at IRC § 7421(a). It provides that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person.” While the language is straightforward, recent opinions have struggled to apply its reach, especially in the context of challenges to information reporting requirements backstopped by the possible imposition of penalties.
CIC is a case we discussed previously when a district court in Tennessee dismissed the suit. CIC, a manager of captives, and an individual who also managed captives and provides tax advice to them, sued claiming in part that the Notice imposed substantial costs and that the IRS in the Notice effectively promulgated legislative rules without complying with the APA’s mandatory notice and comment requirements. The plaintiffs sought an injunction prohibiting the IRS from enforcing the Notice and a declaratory judgment claiming that the notice was invalid.
The district court and now the Sixth Circuit held that the AIA prohibited the suit. The AIA landscape when considering challenges to reporting requirements is somewhat in flux as a result of the Supreme Court’s discussion of the related Tax Injunction Act (TIA) in the Direct Marketing case from a few years ago. As you may recall, Direct Marketing involved a Colorado law that required out-of-state retailers to provide the state with information reports on their sales to residents of the state. In Direct Marketing, the Supreme Court held that the requirements were not sufficiently connected with the collection or assessment of tax for the challenge to be barred by the Tax Injunction Act, legislation that is similar to though slightly different from the AIA in that it imposes restrictions on cases involving taxes imposed by the states rather than the federal government.
Shortly after Direct Marketing, in Florida Bankers the DC Circuit (in an opinion by then Judge Kavanaugh) held that the AIA prevented bankers from challenging heightened reporting requirements when the failure to comply would lead to civil tax penalties under Subchapter 68B of the Code. In Florida Bankers the DC Circuit, relying in large part on the ACA case Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, held that the civil penalty for violating the reporting requirements was a tax and thus subject to the AIA’s reach.
Not surprisingly the plaintiffs in CIC attempted to situate the case within Direct Marketing and focused their arguments on the challenge to the IRS’s implicit regulatory regime rather than a challenge to the assessment or collection of any tax.
The Sixth Circuit in CIC disagreed, and adopted the Florida Bankers rationale in finding that the AIA prevented the suit challenging the IRS Notice. In so doing it focused on the consequences to failing to comply with the reporting requirements; that is, the civil penalties for failing to compile and maintain records relating to reportable transactions:
Plaintiff argues that the “information gathering” and “records maintenance” requirements of the Notice are focused on the act of reporting to the taxing authority information used to determine tax liability, not the discrete, subsequent acts of assessment or collection of that liability. This argument misses the mark.
While it is true that information reporting is a separate step in the taxation process that occurs before assessment or collection, see Direct Marketing, 135 S. Ct. at 1130, Plaintiff’s argument presupposes that the relevant taxes in this AIA analysis are the third-party taxes the collection of which the Notice is designed to facilitate. As previously discussed, that is incorrect. Like the challenged regulation in Florida Bankers, the Notice is indeed “two or three steps removed” from any third-party taxes. 799 F.3d at 1069. But once it is established that the relevant tax is the penalty imposed for violation of the Notice’s requirements, it becomes clear that Plaintiff’s suit is focused on that tax’s assessment or collection. Plaintiff’s suit seeks to invalidate the Notice, which is the entire basis for that tax. If successful, Plaintiff’s suit would “restrain (indeed eliminate)” it. Id. at 1067.
After finding that the matter was covered by the AIA, the majority opinion concluded that the narrow “no alternative remedy” exception to the AIA did not apply because there was the opportunity to challenge the notice by failing to comply with its requirements, paying the associated penalties and then pursuing a refund suit.
Conclusion
The majority opinion (as does the dissent) extensively cites the Hickman and Kerska article Restoring the Lost Anti-Injunction Act, 103 Va. L. Rev. 1683, 1686 (2017), an article PT has reviewed and I discussed earlier this year. In the opinion’s conclusion, there is an explicit acknowledgement (in part based on that article and related scholarship) that there may be legitimate grievances associated with limits on challenging the IRS’s purported failure to comply with the APA. As I said earlier this year in PT and in an upcoming article in Temple Law Review, perhaps it is time for a fresh legislative look at ways taxpayers can challenge IRS guidance – an idea that I adopt from a 2017 article from Professor Stephanie Hunter McMahon (blogged by PT here), also cited by the dissent (as is Pat Smith, who has written about these issues for PT too).
One final point. This brief blog post does not dive deeply into the argument that Florida Bankers is wrongly decided. The dissent believes that to be the case.
In Florida Bankers, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit held that the Anti-Injunction Act barred a similar suit challenging the legality of a reporting requirement that the IRS enforced with a tax. See 799 F.3d at 1072. That is because, the court reasoned, the tax is “imposed as a direct consequence of violating the regulation,” and so “[i]nvalidating the regulation would directly bar collection of that tax.” Id. at 1069. For the D.C. Circuit majority, this distinguished the case from Direct Marketing because “the tax . . . is not two or three steps removed from the regulation in question.” Id. In other words, there was no attenuation between the assessment and collection of the tax, on the one hand, and invalidating the regulation on the other.
That misses the mark. Enjoining a reporting requirement enforced by a tax does not necessarily bar the assessment or collection of that tax. That is because the tax does not result from the requirement per se. The only way for the IRS to assess and collect the tax is for a party to violate the requirement. So enjoining the requirement only stops the assessment and collection of the tax in the sense that a party cannot first violate the requirement and then become liable for the tax. Surely, this is the kind of attenuated relationship between “restrain,” “assessment,” and “collection” that Direct Marketing rejected.
Underlying the dissent’s different take on the reach of the AIA is its practical concern for the consequences of the majority’s approach, including the difficult position people find themselves in if they believe that the guidance that the IRS issues is either procedurally or substantively improper:
Under the majority’s decision, CIC now only has two options: (1) acquiesce to a potentially unlawful reporting requirement that will cost it significant money and reputational harm or (2) flout the requirement, i.e., “break the law,” to the tune of $50,000 in penalties for each transaction it fails to report. See 26. U.S.C. § 6707(a)–(b). Only if it (or someone else) follows the latter path—and only when (or if) the Government comes to collect the penalty—will any court be able to pass judgment on the legality of the regulatory action.
The dissent goes on to note that there are possible criminal sanctions under 7203 for willfully failing to keep the records that the Notice required:
In other words, the only lawful means a person has of challenging the reporting requirement here is to violate the law and risk financial ruin and criminal prosecution. That is probably enough to test the intestinal fortitude of anyone. And it leaves CIC in precisely the bind that pre-enforcement judicial review was meant to avoid.
I strongly suspect we will see more circuit opinions and perhaps the Supreme Court weigh in on whether it is possible to reconcile Direct Marketing and the DC Circuit’s approach. For more on these issues and the tension between Direct Marketing and Florida Bankers, including a detailed discussion of how the term “restrain” may differ in the context of the TIA and AIA (including an analysis of the Tenth Circuit’s approach to the issue in the 2017 decision Green Solution Retail which like CIC emphasized the differences between the TIA and the AIA), see the most recent update to IRS Practice and Procedure at ¶ ¶ 1.06[2] Restraining the Assessment or Collection of Tax: The Necessary Nexus to Assessment or Collection.