2024-11-14
Each year the Tax Court submits a “Budget Justification” to Congress. The latest Budget Justification was dated March, 4, 2024. For the past several years, the Budget Justification has included the total number of opinions issued by the Tax Court during its most recent fiscal year ended September 30th.
For example, Page 20 of the most recent Budget Justification includes a table showing the number of opinions issued for the past several years. The table (and the text just above the table) indicates that the Tax Court issued 294 opinions during the fiscal year ended September 30, 2023. This figure is not correct. The correct number of opinions issued by the Tax Court for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2023 is 252. Thus, the Tax Court overstated the number of opinions it issued by 17%.
The reason for the difference is that the Tax Court will often issue a single opinion that applies to multiple docket numbers. If you search on Dawson, the search results will show a separate link for each docket number. However, multiple links may be to the exact same opinion. For example, if you search on Dawson for opinions issued on July 11, 2023, you will see seven links to one opinion issued by Judge Urda that day. The Tax Court is counting the seven links as if seven opinions were issued, but only one opinion was issued for seven different docket numbers.
For the fiscal year 2023, there were 294 links, but only 252 opinions.
What is interesting is that the Tax Court has made this exact same error for multiple prior years. A note below the table on Page 20 indicates that the Tax Court made this mistake for fiscal years 2020 and 2021. Unfortunately, the Tax Court does not appear to be learning from its mistakes.
[N.B. The table on Page 20 appears to materially understate the memorandum opinions for the fiscal year 2018.]
