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address.2 See Mulvania v. Commissioner, supra at 67-68. We note
that the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has
squarely addressed and rejected petitioners' argument in Berger
v. Commissioner, 404 F.2d 668 (3d Cir. 1968), affg. 48 T.C. 848
(1967). In Berger at 675 the Court stated:
We therefore reject a construction of the procedural
provisions of section 6212 which would yield the
startling conclusion that a notice given to clients and
their lawyer is inadequate even though they received it
in due course, simply because the lawyer's copy should
have been the original, and the channel of certified
mail which was used for the taxpayers should have been
used for the lawyer.
Moreover, petitioners' argument that because the IRS did not send
an original of the deficiency notice to Ms. Steinhauer, the date
of her receipt commences the 90-day period for filing of the
petition lacks merit.
Turning to petitioners' argument that they were advised by
several employees of the IRS that the date by which a petition
must be filed in this case was March 14, 1996, we are unable to
provide any relief for petitioners. The law is clear that
erroneous legal advice rendered by employees of the IRS generally
is not binding on the Commissioner. Dixon v. United States, 381
U.S. 68, 72-73 (1965); Schuster v. Commissioner, 312 F.2d 311
(9th Cir. 1962), affg. in part and revg. in part 32 T.C. 998 and
2 However, as indicated earlier, it appears that the copy
Ms. Steinhauer received was stamped "ORIGINAL". In this day of
modern communication and photocopies, there is little to
distinguish an original from a copy stamped "ORIGINAL".
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