Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of September 27, 2024.
Welcome back, constant reader. There’s no snappy introduction this week since I have a lot of client work sitting on my desk. Instead, I have the following confessions:
I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, and I am impressed by their control of the first three games. But … I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, so I recognize that the records of the Bills’ first three opponents are a combined 2 wins and 7 losses. I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, and I am optimistic, but only cautiously optimistic. I am a fan of the Buffalo Bills, so I believe that maybe this one time, Lucy will not pull the football off of the tee before I kick it.
There’s a bunch of jurisdictional boredom in last week’s cases. And there are a few nuggets: For instance, I admire the Tribunal for imposing, on its own motion, a frivolous petition penalty in one of the Decisions. And ALJ Chu-Fong dropped some breadcrumbs that might lead some COVID-era non-resident taxpayer-employees away from New York’s dark and ominous convenience of the employer forest and out into the sunshiny fields of bona fide business necessity. And with that overly long and tortured metaphor, I bid you adieu.
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of September 18, 2024.
It seems like the DTA has been doing a bit of end-of-the-summer cleaning as we careen back into school-days mode. Most of the determinations posted over the last two weeks were summary dismissals of cases in which the petitions were deficient for a number of reasons. These determinations are very short, and our TiNY summaries are similarly brief. But there are a couple of cases that merited a more thorough analysis. So, enjoy!
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of September 6, 2024.
The Kids are back to school and the DTA is back to issuing determinations and decisions that are mostly timies and dismissals for lack of jurisdiction. Matter of Bryant is of some interest in that the credit denial in that case was based on a lack of information from an agency that was not the NYS Tax Department. The taxpayer’s inability to get information from the other state agency was the reason he could not satisfy his burden of proving entitlement to the credit. It sounds like Petitioner made many attempts to get the information but was stymied. Did the information exist? Was the inability to retrieve the information due to some failure on the part of the other administrative agency? We’ll probably never know.
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of August 20, 2024.
There were three determinations to report on this week, and a majority of them are not Timies! The two substantive cases address how to properly source income from a trade, business, or profession carried on, or previously carried on, in New York under Tax Law § 631. And in both cases, the Judges found that such sourcing needed to follow the path set forth in applicable regulations as required by the statute.
I didn’t watch any of the Olympics other than the part of the closing ceremonies when they cut from Paris to LA. But I heard that break dancing was an Olympic event in Paris for the first time – but it’s already been axed for the next Summer Games. Wow. Since the Summer Olympics are going to LA in 2028, maybe they can have an Olympic event like the contest at the end of “Eight Mile” when B-Rabbit resorts to a self-deprecating rap to dispatch Papa Doc. I liked that, so I’d probably watch something like that again. And like in Eight Mile, shouldn’t the audience (maybe the TV audience to avoid host-country bias) participate in the judging of certain Olympic events?
The IOC knows where to find me if it needs more suggestions.
Here are the sales tax cases from the TiNY Report for the week of August 13, 2024.
The mental conversation I just conducted with myself:
“What should I write today about this TiNY Report being late again?”
“How about the truth? You have been diverting your non-billable attentions to the summer because ‘summertime is running out’ and ‘supplies are limited.’”
“No one cares about your personal life. How about ‘no excuses” since you have no excuses.”
“The Alice in Chains song ‘No Excuses?’ That’s a good one. For some reason that song reminds me of the Blues Traveler tune ‘The Mountains Win Again.’"
“Wow. 90s much?”
“Shut up.”
“No, you shut up.”
(nothingness)
We present a bunch of pent-up case summaries today, only a few of which have a worthwhile tale to tell. For my money (ed.: there’s actually no money involved) I recommend Saslaw, in which a pro se petitioner won a difficult responsible officer case; Rockaway Realty Associates, involving a local mortgage recording tax refund claim (a unicorn of a case if ever there was); and Lynch, discussing the limitation in the “548-day rule” prohibiting spouses from remaining in New York during the relevant period.