Tenth Circuit Sides With Government on Intermountain Issue

The Tenth Circuit, after a long period of deliberation, has reversed the Tax Court in Salman Ranch.  (Opinion linked here.)  This now makes the score 3-2 in favor of the government in the series of appeals that have spread to most circuits.  See our original report here.

The Tenth Circuit’s opinion closely tracks the reasoning of the Federal Circuit in Grapevine.  The court first looked at the Supreme Court’s decision in Colony and concluded that it should not be read as holding that the statute unambiguously supports the taxpayer’s position.  (The Tenth Circuit did note its disagreement with the Seventh Circuit’s conclusion in Beard that the statute unambiguously resolves the issue in the government’s favor.)   Having found that Colony was not an obstacle to the issuance of valid Treasury regulations, the court proceeded to apply the Chevron test to the regulations and, like the Federal Circuit, ruled that the regulations surmounted the relatively low bar of being a reasonable interpretation of the statute.  The Tenth Circuit stated:  “Although we are not convinced the IRS’s interpretation is the only permissible one or even the one we would have adopted if addressing this question afresh, we are satisfied that it is a ‘permissible construction’ within the mandate of Chevron.” 

The Salman Ranch case presented one interesting wrinkle not found in the other Intermountain cases.  The Salman Ranch partnership had already prevailed on the identical issue in the Federal Circuit for a different tax year.  See Salman Ranch Ltd. v. Commissioner, 573 F.3d 1362 (Fed. Cir. 2009).  Ordinarily, that decision would have collateral estoppel effect in other litigation on the same issue between the same parties, and therefore it would have controlled the outcome in the Tenth Circuit.  The Tenth Circuit ruled, however, that there was no collateral estoppel effect because the “rules” had changed in the interim — because of the issuance of the new regulations.  The Federal Circuit had observed in Grapevine that the Chevron doctrine gives “regulatory agencies, not the courts, primary responsibility to interpret ambiguous statutory provisions.”  The Tenth Circuit’s decision goes that statement one better with respect to the power of agencies to make law, at least in this particular context.  It potentially gives regulatory agencies more power than even Congress to change the law, as Congress usually does not act retroactively when it enacts new legislation to overturn a court decision.  Without retroactive effect, new legislation would not destroy the collateral estoppel effect of a court decision.

If the taxpayer wishes to seek rehearing, the petition would be due on July 18.  By that time, the issues could be on their way to the Supreme Court because the government’s deadline for seeking certiorari in Home Concrete, the most advanced of these cases, is July 5.