On November 4, 2020, we all thought that the COVID-19 pandemic was going to be long over by now. We certainly did not think we were going to get so far down the Greek alphabet of variants of this virus. And, this author certainly did not think that she was going to have to keep looking up what the next letter of the Greek alphabet is.  Now we are at mu, and there does not seem to be an end in sight.

It seems like when the IRS issued Revenue Procedure 2020-49, it thought that the COVID-19 pandemic was going to be over by now too.  As a reminder, on November 4, 2020, the IRS issued Revenue Procedure 2020-49, which allowed telephonic TEFRA hearings to continue through September 30, 2021.  Specifically, during this period, a governmental unit can meet the TEFRA requirement that the public hearing be held in a convenient location for affected residents by affording the general public access to the hearing by toll-free telephone call.^[1]

With September 30^th right around the corner, public finance tax attorneys were starting to get nervous^[2] about whether these hearings were going to have to be in-person as cases are back on the rise.  We can all breathe a sigh of relief because yesterday the IRS has further extended the period during which telephonic TEFRA hearings can be held in lieu of in-person TEFRA hearings until March 31, 2022 through issued Revenue Procedure 2021-39.

Hopefully, this will be the last extension that we need and we won’t have variants that start sounding like sororities.

FOOTNOTES

^[1] The authors of this blog are still explaining to people what constitutes a toll-free number.

^[2] More nervous than we usually are.