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Commissioner, 120 T.C. 62, 66 (2003). Understanding why the
Billingses owed tax but had no “deficiency” after they filed
their amended return requires a bit of explanation: Section
6211(a) defines a “deficiency” as the “amount by which the tax
imposed * * * exceeds * * * the amount shown as the tax by the
taxpayer upon his return.” (Emphasis added.) The Code itself
doesn’t tell us what effect the filing of an amended return has,
but the related regulation does. It states that “[a]ny amount
shown as additional tax on an ‘amended return’ * * * filed after
the due date of the return, shall be treated as an amount shown
by the taxpayer ‘upon his return’ for purposes of computing the
amount of the deficiency.” Sec. 301.6211-1(a), Proced. & Admin.
Regs. Because the Billingses’ amended 1999 return was filed well
after April 15, 2000, and the Commissioner accepted that return,
the increase in tax that it showed has to be treated as an amount
shown on their return.
That left Billings able to look only to subsection (f) for
relief, and when the Commissioner denied it to him, left him with
the problem of where to seek judicial review. He filed in our
Court and, under our decision in Ewing I, he was right to do so
because we had held that section 6015(e) gave us jurisdiction to
grant (f) relief in nondeficiency stand-alone cases like his.
Ewing I in turn built on two other cases. The first was
Butler, where we had to decide whether we had jurisdiction to
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