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deficiency notice to be valid and denied the taxpayers' motion to
dismiss. Id. at 1366.
In analyzing the issue on appeal, the majority of the panel
of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit concluded that the
Commissioner must consider information relating to a particular
taxpayer before it can be said that the Commissioner has
determined a deficiency with respect to that taxpayer. Id. at
1368. More specifically, the Court indicated in a footnote that,
in order to determine a deficiency against a taxpayer based upon
a tax shelter adjustment, the Commissioner cannot rely solely
upon an examination of the tax return of the tax shelter entity
but must also examine the taxpayer's return to see whether the
taxpayer in fact claimed a deduction with respect to the
particular tax shelter. Id. at 1367 n.6. With this standard in
mind, the Court concluded that the deficiency notice was invalid
under section 6212(a) because the notice on its face revealed
that the Commissioner had not reviewed the taxpayers' return or
otherwise made a determination respecting the taxpayers'
liability for the particular taxable year. Id. at 1370.
The Scar issue subsequently resurfaced in this Court in
Campbell v. Commissioner, 90 T.C. 110 (1988). In Campbell, the
Commissioner mailed a notice of deficiency to the taxpayers
including: (1) The traditional cover letter containing
boilerplate language identifying the package as a notice of
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