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time for a taxpayer to submit a request to
the Commissioner for relief under section
6015 regarding underreported taxes.
Id. at 505.
On appeal, the Commissioner changed his mind about the
proper construction of the new language. The Ninth Circuit
agreed with him (and the dissent in Ewing I) that the first step
in our reasoning--finding that the amendment to section 6015(e)
was ambiguous--violated "the basic principle of statutory
construction that ‘a statute ought, upon the whole, to be so
construed that, if it can be prevented, no clause, sentence, or
word shall be superfluous, void, or insignificant.'" Ewing, 439
F.3d at 1014. It concluded that “the Tax Court lacked
jurisdiction because no deficiency had been asserted.” Id. at
1013. In Bartman, the Eighth Circuit adopted the Ninth Circuit’s
holding, though in doing so, it may have been somewhat imprecise
in its use of the terms “assertion,” “determination”, and
“assessment” of a deficiency. Id. at 787 (Tax Court has
jurisdiction over section 6015 petitions “only where a deficiency
has been asserted”); id. (Tax Court has no jurisdiction over
section 6015 petitions “where no deficiency has been determined
by the IRS”); id. at 788 (no Tax Court jurisdiction “because no
deficiency had been assessed against Bartman”).7
7 We construe Bartman’s holding to be the sentence “We agree
with the Ninth Circuit that the tax court lacks jurisdiction
(continued...)
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