Brittany Montrois, Class of More than 700,000 Similarly Situated Individuals and Businesses, et al. v. United States

I. Whether a U.S. court of appeals can explicitly decline to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent requiring a voluntary act and a “special benefit” for an agency to charge a user fee, and instead apply its own threepronged test to determine whether user fees can be charged annually under 31 U.S.C. § 9701 to a class of approximately 1,500,000 tax return preparers with respect to registration and re-registration of a permanent identification number used by the Internal Revenue Service? II. Under SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U.S. 194 (1947), when the administrative record clearly shows the grounds for an agency’s charging of user fees via seven (7) separate clear consistent statements and the lawfulness of those grounds is invalidated by a U.S court of appeals, can the agency’s simple mention of a potential favorable byproduct in a related regulation supply the basis for the same court of appeals to uphold agency action? To Petitioners’ knowledge, these issues have not been previously addressed by any U.S. district court or U.S. court of appeals.