Originally published on Forbes.com May 12th, 2013
Nothing like a grandmother beating the IRS in Tax Court to cheer one’s heart on Mother’s Day. Even better she did not have to hire a lawyer. Joyce Coultman was a nurse practitioner living with her daughter, grandson and granddaughter. In 2008, her daughter, Nicole, was unemployed for the entire year. They all lived in Ms. Coultman’s co-op apartment in Brooklyn. She was paying all the bills for the apartment. So she claimed a dependency exemption for her grandson, who is identified by the Court as E.P. She also claimed head of household filing status, child care credit and the child tax credit.
This is one of the cases where I don’t care what the law is. She should win. She could be down in Florida enjoying retirement (According to the decision she was 75 at the time of the trial), but she’s still working to take care of the grandkids and the IRS is coming at her over less than four grand. Go fight crime someplace else. That’s probably why they haven’t picked me to be a Tax Court judge – among other reasons too numerous to mention.
The argument that the IRS was putting forward was the “tie-breaker” rule. If E.P. was claimed by both Ms. Coultman and her daughter, the tie-breaker rule would give the exemption to the parent. Ms. Coultman did not believe that her daughter, who was not employed during 2008, claimed E.P. The IRS argued that she had, but was unable to introduce any proof.
Ms. Coultman lost on the child care credit because she had no proof of her expenditures not even remembering how much they were. That’s a shame, but that’s what happens when you have real judges making the decisions. What I can’t figure out is why the judge did not admonish the IRS for not being able to prove that Ms. Coultman’s daughter claimed the dependency exemption. Aren’t they supposed to keep the returns ? If they could not find the return of Ms. Coultman’s daughter or anybody who claimed E.P. (Taxpayers have had to include social security numbers for dependents since the mid-eighties), why had they not settled ?
I wanted to find a video that would be an appropriate way to celebrate a grandmother beating the IRS in Tax Court. I think this clip of Aishat Maksudova, who killed a wolf with her bare hands and an axe does the trick.
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