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Arthur Dalton, Jr., and Beverly Dalton v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue

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Before Lynch, Chief Judge, Selya and Boudin, Circuit Judges.

This appeal turns primarily on the standard of review that courts should apply when examining conclusions reached by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) following a collection due process (CDP) hearing. See 26 U.S.C. § 6330(b). While courts generally have agreed that review in this context is for abuse of discretion, no court has had the occasion to parse that standard and analyze how it plays out with respect to subsidiary factual and legal determinations made by the IRS during the CDP process. We grapple with that issue today.

The issue arises in a case in which the taxpayers offered to settle their tax liability for pennies on the dollar. The IRS determined that the taxpayers could afford to pay more because they owned valuable real estate and, therefore, rejected the offer in compromise. In a first-tier appeal, the Tax Court reviewed the IRS’s underlying ownership determination de novo, found that the taxpayers were not the owners of the real estate in question, and directed the IRS to accept the offer in compromise. It later ordered the IRS to pay attorneys’ fees to the taxpayers as prevailing parties.

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