COMPARING THE DECISION MAKING OF SPECIALIZED COURTS AND GENERAL COURTS: AN EXPLORATION OF TAX DECISIONS

Justice System Journal, 2005 by Howard, Robert M

The tax court, contrary to expectations, seems to be both more expert and more ideological in its decision making than the district court. As expected, the more liberal the judge, the greater the likelihood of support for the Internal Revenue Service, while the more conservative the judge, the greater the likelihood of support for the taxpayer. Tax court judges are more ideological in deciding cases than are district court judges. Finally, the hypothesis that liberal judges would react more negatively, and conservatives more positively, to tax-protestor or tax-fraud issues was confirmed for both courts.

Many structural hypotheses deriving from prior research are also confirmed. The general jurisdiction court is more likely to rely on precedent than is the specialized court, and a special judge is likely to decide issues differently from regular tax court judges; however, prior IRS experience does not matter for type of judges. Curiously, the presence of an attorney appears to help the taxpayer in the more specialized tax court but not in the district court. This could be an artifact of sample as counsel represented most taxpayers in the district courts, while more than one-third of the tax court litigants appeared pro se, but it could also represent the ability of the tax court judge to appreciate and understand the arguments of counsel, whereas the more generalized district court judge relies on the agency. As expected, the district court was more sensitive to the type of litigant, being more likely to support a business or a trust or estate, than was the tax court.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

The results show a different picture than anticipated and perhaps a different role than considered appropriate for a specialized court. The specialized court, free from any practical structural constraints, uses its expertise to allow a much freer hand in decisions for its judges' policy preferences. This seems to be a deviation from the ideal that a specialized court used its expertise to decide the issues without reference to ideology. However, this ideal ignores the practical matter that the collection and distribution of revenue is the single most important and politically charged issue that any government must confront. Who or what should pay and how much, and who or what should receive this revenue and how much, are inescapably political questions charged with ideological overtones (see Johnston, 2003). Despite repeated calls for simplification and ease, any system of taxation is likely to have complex laws, rules, and regulations. The resulting interpretation of complicated questions of assessment and collection requires discretion and technical expertise, and any result requires opinion and judgment-opinion and judgment that cannot be divorced from basic views about the collection and allocation of scarce resources. Thus, while there has been some concern that, like the tax court, specialized courts would be no more than extensions of the IRS and thus likely to exhibit bias in favor of the agency, and while the U.S. Tax Court might issue more rulings in favor of the IRS than the U.S. District Court, the reason might be as much due to ideology as any bias based on structure or experience.