Jack S. Kannry, et ux. v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue

By way of permitted introductory preface, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”), perhaps the one federal agency which affects every American family, in having to meet annual income tax obligations, derives its authority solely from federal statutes and its own regulations, intended to be consistent with such legislative mandates. Just as all taxpayers must comply with such requirements, so too must the IRS, as to which compliance the taxpayers have a right to rely. One such statute, knows as the Stafford Act, promulgated to provide taxpayer relief arising from federally declared disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy, and consistent IRS regulations for filing of amended returns to recover for otherwise uncompensated disaster losses, was relied upon by petitioners and very likely countless other taxpayers subject to this disaster, but not even considered, let alone properly applied by the IRS. Several other IRS errors of commission and omission, some of which IRS tax counsel belatedly conceded, are intended to be subsumed herein. The question thereby presented is whether the IRS should be free to pick and choose which mandated statutes and regulations to apply, and to avoid other highly relevant ones, by ignoring or side stepping them, upon which countless disastervictim taxpayers have properly relied, and will do so in the future, such that the impact of the decision below is to create a widespread deleterious result for many current and future taxpayers as to the questionable consistency and reliability of