US Supreme Court to hear a Case Involving the IRS’s use of Summons

The United States Supreme Court will be hearing a case concerning the process by which the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) must notify a taxpayer when issuing a third-party summons. Typically, the IRS is required to notify the taxpayer when issuing a summons. However, there is an exception to this rule when the summons is being used to collect a tax debt. The issue at hand in this case is whether notification is necessary when a third party’s records are summoned in order to help the IRS collect a debt owed by another individual.

In this particular case, the IRS issued summonses to three banks in an attempt to collect a tax debt from a man. These summonses sought financial records belonging to the man’s wife and two law firms. The wife and law firms argue that the summonses are invalid because they were not given prior notification. There is currently a split among the appeals courts on this issue, and the Supreme Court has chosen to take up the case in order to provide a resolution.