Here at Noonan’s Notes world headquarters, we don’t write about every case that comes out of the Division of Tax Appeals, but every once in a while, a case comes out that is notable in some way where we think it’s worth a discussion. Often, these are cases where we disagree with the judge’s reasoning, but over the last couple of weeks, we saw two taxpayer victories that we wanted to highlight because the facts of each of them were a bit unusual. In both Determinations, the tax forms filed with the Tax Department that listed the Petitioner’s names as responsible persons were determined to be insufficient to hold the Petitioners as responsible persons when considered with the other facts in each of the cases, which seems like reason enough to take a closer look at these two cases.
As our regular readers know, we’ve been following the Zelinsky “convenience-rule” case through New York’s Division of Tax Appeals over the past couple of years.
Earlier this month, House Republicans issued a broad package of tax proposals to be made part of the “Big Beautiful Tax Bill” that the Trump administration has promised to enact. For weeks if not months, there has been a lot of chatter about what will happen to the SALT deduction, as many House Republicans from blue states like New York and California have been insistent on reviving the deduction, or at the very least increasing the cap on the deduction (currently set at $10,000) to a much larger number.
One of the more obscure provisions in the New York residency law, known as the 548-Day Rule, allows a New York-domiciled taxpayer to be treated as a nonresident simply by spending lots of time out of the United States for an 18-month period.