From TiNY: We interrupt our not-so-regularly-scheduled … umm … schedule for a special report by our court-watch correspondents: Open Weaver Banks and Tim Noonan. I’m sure all our readers are familiar with Open as a result of her recent article “Do cross border incursions by extraterrestrial drones implicate New Jersey Use Tax?” But you may not be so familiar with Tim since he tends to keep a low profile.
All kidding aside, Happy Holidays from TiNY! As a special holiday treat, here is Open and Tim’s take on the November oral argument before the Tax Appeals Tribunal in Matter of Zelinsky (with some parenthetical commentary by TiNY). Zelinsky may end up being one of the most important SALT cases addressing the unique SALT circumstances resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, and Judge DiFiore’s determination against Petitioner may be found here. Professor Zelinsky knew of our firm’s interest in convenience rule disputes and was kind enough to share a copy of the transcript of the Tribunal argument.
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of December 21, 2024.
The DTA did very little in early November, but since then has been flooding its website with content. And the content is not always being posted by the DTA on Thursdays, which used to be the standard schedule. And that screws up TiNY’s production schedule. Who are we kidding? TiNY doesn’t have a schedule!
Rather than hit you with a mega-posting here, we’ll break the cases down into three episodes. This is the first episode in the series, but we’re not going to call it “Episode I.” Instead, it’s “Episode IV: A New Hope.” Hey, if it was good enough for George Lucas, it’s good enough for TiNY. So:
About a month ago, in an administrative hearing agency far, far away …
[Cue TiNY’s theme music. If we had any. Which we don’t. TiNY is a blog, and like most blogs it doesn’t have any audio component. But if TiNY had theme music, it would be something topical like The Beatles’ “Tax Man” or The Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon,” both of which are about the high levels of progressive taxes being imposed in the 1960s by the British Labor government headed by Harold Wilson. Feel free to fact-check me on this.]
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of November 18, 2024.
There are an order and two determinations this week for your thoughtful consideration. The order refers to 36 separately numbered allegations of error by the Division. And, because I am of a certain age and it is Thanksgiving season, this triggered a memory of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie. The song was notable for its 1960s anti-establishment narrative and wry humor. It also took up one whole side of an album. For the benefit of you kids out there, albums were round vinyl media for delivering permanently embedded audio content. Back in the day, most album sides had between five to seven songs making up roughly 22 minutes of audio. In the 1970s and 1980s, we dinosaurs would re-record both sides of an album onto the single side of a 90-minute cassette tape so we could have two albums’ worth of music on one tape to play in our cars since there was no easy way to play a vinyl album in a moving vehicle.
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of November 4, 2024.
TiNY has been off the air for the last few weeks while waiting for the DTA to provide enough content for us to prepare a Report with critical mass. Cases have been dribbling out recently, and over the last three weeks, there is just one Tribunal decision and one ALJ determination on which to report. We had hoped for more this week and were disappointed.
Still, the Decision and Determination were not process cases (i.e., neither case involved timeliness or other jurisdictional issues). So, at least there is some substance there.
The next TiNY Report will be post-election. Thank goodness. Talking heads of all stripes are launching their partisan grenades at a frequency that is impossible to ignore. Your editor yearns for simpler times when 95% of the news he needed came from the Weather Channel, ESPN, Tax Notes, Weekend Update, and the DTA website.
There were no decisions or determinations posted in the last two weeks. There was, however, an order posted each week.
And in other news: Prior to September 27, only lawyers, CPAs, enrolled agents, select employees and officers of businesses, and certain others (those with the Division of Tax Appeals’ permission) could represent taxpayers in matters before the DTA. As the result of a recent law change, taxpayers may now elect to be represented by their niece, babysitter, the kid who cuts their lawn, or anyone else who has achieved the wizened age of eighteen. Heaven help the first pimple-popping Rep that asks Judge Law to adjourn a hearing because it conflicts with their prom.
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of September 27, 2024.
Welcome back, constant reader. There’s no snappy introduction this week since I have a lot of client work sitting on my desk. Instead, I have the following confessions:
I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, and I am impressed by their control of the first three games. But … I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, so I recognize that the records of the Bills’ first three opponents are a combined 2 wins and 7 losses. I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, and I am optimistic, but only cautiously optimistic. I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, so I believe that maybe this one time, Lucy will not pull the football off of the tee before I kick it.
There’s a bunch of jurisdictional boredom in last week’s cases. And there are a few nuggets: For instance, I admire the Tribunal for imposing, on its own motion, a frivolous petition penalty in one of the Decisions. And ALJ Chu-Fong dropped some breadcrumbs that might lead some COVID-era non-resident taxpayer-employees away from New York’s dark and ominous convenience of the employer forest and out into the sunshiny fields of bona fide business necessity. And with that overly long and tortured metaphor, I bid you adieu.