Opinion
6446-19L
11-12-2021
Wendell C. Robinson & May T. Jung-Robinson Petitioners v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue Respondent
ORDER
David Gustafson, Judge
This case is scheduled for trial at the Tax Court's session in Washington, D.C., beginning December 13, 2021. On October 14, 2021, the Commissioner filed a motion (Doc. 52) under Rule 91(f) for an order to show cause why the Commissioner's proposed stipulations should not be deemed stipulated. Petitioners filed a response in opposition (Doc. 53); and the Commissioner filed a reply (Doc. 55).
The Court held a status conference with the parties on November 9, 2021. From that Conference the Court perceives that petitioners do intend to cooperate with the stipulation process, provided that they can maintain their objections to some of the facts and documents to be stipulated, and that is certainly their right. We will therefore deny the Commissioner's motion, but we expect the parties to work diligently on finalizing a comprehensive stipulation of facts. A party's objections as to materiality, relevance, and hearsay (and any the objections) may be explicitly reserved in the stipulation, but those objections would not warrant the party's refusal to stipulate a fact he does not actually dispute on factual grounds. We observe that the Commissioner has incorporated into his draft (which he is willing to file) seven of the eight paragraphs that petitioners proposed, and this is the sort of cooperation that we expect the parties to undertake.
As the Court noted during the phone conference, the parties' stipulation should, to the extent possible, include facts about Appeals' verification of the IRS's compliance (or non-compliance) with section 6213(b) and facts about the IRS's correction of a misapplied $39,000 payment.
It is
ORDERED that the Commissioner's motion (Doc. 52) is denied without prejudice. It is further
ORDERED that the parties shall note their obligations under our standing pretrial order (Doc. 51), pursuant to which their pretrial memoranda are due November 22, 2021 (see para. 5(B)), and their stipulation of facts is due November 29, 2021 (see para. 6(A)). 1