2025-05-03
Yesterday the Tax Court published its Budget Justification to Congress. We had previously blogged how the Budget Justification overstated the number of opinions issued. Yesterday’s report continues to inflate the numbers.
Table 19 (page 25) of the report states that the Tax Court issued 234 opinions in the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024 (“FY2024”). In actuality, the Tax Court only issued 200 opinions during FY2024.
The Memorandum Opinions are the most overstated (the report states 153 when only 125 were actually issued).
The “T.C. opinions” are overstated by 2: the Tax Court says it issued 27 T.C. opinions. It can easily be deduced that only 25 T.C. opinions were issued for FY2024 --- the citations for the T.C. opinions are numbered.
For the calendar year 2023, there were 29 T.C. opinions:
For the calendar year 2024, there were 20 T.C. opinions:
The last T.C. opinion issued during FY2023 was 161 T.C. No. 4 on 9/27/23. This means that there were 9 T.C. opinions issued during the first quarter of FY2024 (161 T.C. No.s 5-13).
The last T.C. opinion issued during FY2024 was 163 T.C. No. 5 on 9/17/24. This means that there were 16 T.C. opinions issued during the second through fourth quarters of FY2024 (162 T.C. No.s 1-11 and 163 T.C. No.s 1-5).
With 9 T.C. opinions in the first quarter and 16 T.C. opinions in the second through fourth quarters, there were 25 total T.C. opinions issued during FY2024. How is the Tax Court arriving at a figure of 27?
For all opinions, the Tax Court inflated its numbers by 17%.