Today we have a reprise of my blogpost “The Master Mechanician,” 3/21/22, and it’s what we used to call a “carbon copy” of the fact pattern therein described. Today’s case is Point Of The River, LLC, Parkway South, LLC, Tax Matters Partner, Docket No. 12049-19, filed 3/25/22.

It’s the same kind of phoneathon with the same RA and the guys from OCC on the horn with the Pointers’ rep, saying there’ll be chops but not specifying which. And of course it’s months until the FPAA issues with the chops, by which point the Boss Hoss has hoofprinted the penalty lead sheet and everything but the menu for lunch.

Now I’m a fan of Judge Albert G (“Scholar Al”) Lauber; no schoolmate of my nephew JVTB (he’s not a minor, but I’ll use initials) and my colleague Peter Reilly, CPA, is a bad guy. So I am not ragging him.

But these formalistic constraints on the curative requirement of Section 6751(b), minimal as it is, rob the statute of the very protections Congress manifestly intended to provide.

Don Vito Corleone and his colleagues did not need to place a horse’s head in the bed of everyone whom they wished to coerce. All they had to intimate is that they were making an offer “you can’t refuse.”

And IRS’ riposte, that wily taxpayers and their Machiavellian counsel and representatives would draw trusting RAs offside by artfully asking in the naïvest way “what about penalties” can be easily met with “let’s stick to the tax due and statutory additions.” Unless, of course, the RA does up the lead sheet and gets it Boss Hooved before the phoneathon.