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.
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.]