Addressing Uniformity and Diversity in Tax Law Decisions
As a general matter, reviewers of the issues of decision uniformity and court diversity take the position that identical sets of facts in a tax case should result in identical court decisions. Reviewers vary on how to achieve that, however. One approach to greater uniformity was taken in the 1943 tax case of Dobson v. Commissioner when the Supreme Court effectively ruled that great deference by all other federal courts was due to Tax Court interpretations of tax law. Congress, suspicious of an “enforcement bias” on the part of the Tax Court, responded five years later with an act establishing a de novo standard of review for the circuit courts in tax cases, which had the effect of overriding the Supreme Court decision in Dobson. That left the Tax Court with a decision on whether to defer to circuit court decisions in deciding new cases, knowing that its interpretations might be accepted by some circuit courts and overturned in others. Initially, the Tax Court decided to maintain its own consistency rather than use the circuit court precedents when they differed. This approach was abandoned in 1970 in Golsen v. Commissioner when the Tax Court decided that it would follow the precedent of the court to which a case could be appealed.
Read more about this topic: Uniformity And Jurisdiction In U.S. Federal Court Tax Decisions
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