- 9 -
court in September 1986. The IRS representative told petitioner
that petitioner needed to "respond" to the notice of deficiency
in order to "correct the problem" and avoid assessment of the
deficiency, additions to tax, and interest.
Thereafter, petitioner contacted her accountant and asked
him to resolve the matter for her. The accountant ultimately
advised petitioner to retain a lawyer.
Petitioner contacted several lawyers but ultimately decided
to retain Leland Franks (petitioner's counsel).
On May 29, 1996, petitioner's counsel telephoned the Austin
service center and spoke with Molly Ramirez (Ms. Ramirez), a tax
examiner. Petitioner's counsel advised Ms. Ramirez that the
notice of deficiency erroneously determined income for 1993 in
respect of the Moncor Bank debt that had been discharged in
bankruptcy in September 1986. Immediately following the
conversation, petitioner's counsel faxed two documents to Ms.
Ramirez: (1) a Form 2848 (Power of Attorney and Declaration of
Representative) authorizing petitioner's counsel to represent
petitioner before the IRS, and (2) the Final Decree from
petitioner's bankruptcy proceeding.8
8 The fax log report generated by petitioner's counsel's fax
machine indicates that the Final Decree was in fact transmitted
to Ms. Ramirez. Respondent's counsel states that a copy of the
Final Decree was not received by Ms. Ramirez. However, in view
of the fact that Ms. Ramirez never contacted petitioner's counsel
to advise that she had not received all of the documents that had
been transmitted, and because respondent's counsel's statement is
unsupported in the record, we do not accept it.
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