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.
It seems like the DTA has been doing a bit of end-of-the-summer cleaning as we careen back into school-days mode. Most of the determinations posted over the last two weeks were summary dismissals of cases in which the petitions were deficient for a number of reasons. These determinations are very short, and our TiNY summaries are similarly brief. But there are a couple of cases that merited a more thorough analysis. So, enjoy!
The Kids are back to school and the DTA is back to issuing determinations and decisions that are mostly timies and dismissals for lack of jurisdiction. Matter of Bryant is of some interest in that the credit denial in that case was based on a lack of information from an agency that was not the NYS Tax Department. The taxpayer’s inability to get information from the other state agency was the reason he could not satisfy his burden of proving entitlement to the credit. It sounds like Petitioner made many attempts to get the information but was stymied. Did the information exist? Was the inability to retrieve the information due to some failure on the part of the other administrative agency? We’ll probably never know.