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84 T.C. 636

Wright v. Commissioner

United States Tax Court

Decided April 8, 1985

United States Tax Court · decided 1985-04-08

Held: Petitioner's conviction under sec. 7206(1), I.R.C. 1954, does not collaterally estop petitioners from denying that any part of their underpayment for 1978 was due to fraud, within the… Held: Petitioner's conviction under sec. 7206(1), I.R.C. 1954, does not collaterally estop petitioners from denying that any part of their underpayment for 1978 was due to fraud, within the meaning of sec. 6653(b), I.R.C. 1954. Respondent's motion for partial summary judgment denied.

Relies on Gray v. Commissioner · Considine v. United States · Goodwin v. Commissioner

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1985-04-08

How this case has been cited

Cited by 137 later decisions — most recently February 2019 · most notably Niedringhaus v. Commissioner (1992), Morse v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue Service (2005)

3 federal appellate ·

6501985199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Kórner, J.,

¶1dissenting: I respectfully disagree with the conclusion of the majority in this case that petitioner, John T. Wright, is not estopped by his conviction under section 7206(1) to deny that his Federal income tax return for 1978 was false in that he willfully and knowingly omitted income therefrom which he knew should have been reported. That fact was conclusively established by his guilty plea to the indictment under section 7206(1), which contains the specific allegation of willfully and intentionally failing to report income which petitioner knew he should have done. He is thus collaterally estopped to deny that fact in the instant case. Nell v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 1982-228. His guilty plea is as much a conviction as a conviction following a jury trial. Gray v. Commissioner, 708 F.2d 243, (6th Cir. 1983), affg. T.C. Memo. 1981-1, cert. denied 466 U.S. _ (1984).

¶2For this reason, I would conclude that there is no issue of material fact in this case as to whether petitioner’s failure to report all his income on his 1978 return was an innocent mistake due to his lack of business acumen. A conviction under section 7206(1) of filing a false return from which income is omitted does not, standing alone, establish the fraudulent intent to evade tax required to support the addition to tax under section 6653(b). However, here the parties have stipulated that petitioner’s willful and knowing omission of income from his 1978 return resulted in an underpayment of tax. In my view, petitioner’s willfully and knowingly filing a false return for the year 1978, combined with the stipulation of the parties that the willful omission of income from that return resulted in an underpayment of tax, establishes the intent to evade necessary to a determination of the addition to tax under section 6653(b). Based on the holdings and discussions in Considine v. United States, 683 F.2d 1285 (9th Cir. 1982); Considine v. United States, 645 F.2d 925 (Ct. Cl. 1981); and Goodwin v. Commissioner, 73 T.C. 215 (1979), I would grant respondent’s Motion for Summary Judgment in this case.

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