Groves v. United States, No. 17-2937 (7th Cir. 2019)
Annotate this CaseGroves, an accountant, allegedly organized, sold, and promoted abusive tax shelters related to distressed Chinese debts in 2005. The IRS assessed a tax penalty against him ten years later. Groves argued that the catch‐all five-year statute of limitations for civil penalties, 28 U.S.C. 2462, applied. The district court struck Groves’s statute‐of‐limitations defense and denied Groves’s motion for judgment on the pleadings and certified the orders for interlocutory review; 28 U.S.C. 1292(b) also required him to seek permission from the Seventh Circuit within ten days. He attempted to obtain that permission on August 18th, the tenth day after the certification order, by emailing an application to appeal. A paralegal mistyped the email address. The email was not delivered. An automated message noting the failure, sent to the paralegal within minutes, landed in a spam folder. The paralegal discovered that notification on Sunday, August 20th, and emailed the application to the correct address. On August 21st, Groves asked the district court to recertify its orders to restart the ten-day clock. The court entered an identical second order. Groves refiled his application the next day. The Seventh Circuit ultimately dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. Recent Supreme Court cases have emphasized that federal courts have no authority to read equitable exceptions into fixed filing deadlines. District courts cannot extend the ten‐day window by simply reentering or recertifying their orders.
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