Opinion ID: 3014809
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Commissioner’s Objections

Text: 35 In his appellate brief, the Commissioner has not confined himself to defending the Tax Court’s opinion on its own terms. He has also put forward several other purported grounds for affirmance. The Commissioner now objects to the completeness and accuracy of Capital’s records, arguing that coding errors and missing data render many of Capital’s conclusions suspect. He also argues that McCarthy drew improper inferences from the aggregate value of Capital’s 23,526 contracts in 1987 to the value of the 376 contracts cancelled in 1994, without first demonstrating that those 376 contracts were a representative sample of the whole. Without the benefit of explicit factual findings by the Tax Court on these issues, we will not undertake to decide them. Instead, we will allow the Tax Court to consider these arguments in the first instance. This consideration will involve both a determination whether the Commissioner is correct about the alleged flaws in Capital’s data and methodology and a decision about the extent to which those flaws invalidate McCarthy’s ultimate valuation.