A year ago I pitched the idea of a sliding scale for Section 6673 frivolity chops. See my blogposts “Guidelines,” 8/12/21, and “Guidelines – Part Deux,” 12/22/21. As I pointed out in the latter, “(I)’m slightly surprised that no wit, wag, or wiseacre, mulcted in four figures for frivolity, doesn’t use the newly-enabled Orders search feature on the DAWSON site to accumulate a bunch orders (hi, Judge Holmes), chopping various petitioners in widely varying amounts for the same, or nearly the same, offenses, and thereby claim abuse of discretion, or excessive fines and penalties, when the chop descends upon them.”

I ordinarily wouldn’t waste time on a case like Peter Michael Budde & Kathryn Marie Budde, Docket No. 22954-21, filed 11/21/22. Especially so, because the new, improved, jim-handy (most affirmativo, ya betcha) DAWSON cybernetic schemozzle has it posted in a format whereby I cannot cut-and-paste Judge Nega’s prose from this off-the-bencher.

So read it for yourself, but it’s the old non-Federal income jive that has been exploded more times than I can count. Judge Nega warned Pete & Kat in a pretrial phoneathon that they were frivoling.

Notwithstanding the same, they frivoled on the trial.

So Judge Nega piles on $5K in Section 6673 chops over and above the Section 6651s that the electros chopped them, and the tax on the $142K Kat says isn’t taxable income, but Judge Nega says is.

Are frivolity chops somehow tied into the amount of unreported income? Or income reported but frivolously claimed to be exempt or excludable? Does a warning personally given (say in a phoneathon) but ignored draw a higher penalty than one given in an order in the current or a previous proceeding?

In short, there should be guidelines, lest one of the above-described wits, wags, or wiseacres file a FOIL and collate all the Tax Court opinions and orders to purport to show that the mulct with which he or she was hit was arbitrary and capricious.

I’ll say it again, should any have tuned in late. I’m not proposing legislation. Sentencing guidelines have been both praised and derided, and I’m not weighing in on that argument. Neither do I propose so to handcuff the Tax Court bench as to eliminate their often-commendable attempts to temper the wind to the shorn lamb, or even the Frenched rack of lamb just pulled from the oven.

But the protesters and dodgers are not lacking in imagination.

Ch J Kathleen (“TBS = The Big Shillelagh”) Kerrigan, please note.