04/13
On April 25, 2020, the Department partially denied the Taxpayer’s request for a refund of gross receipts tax. On July 23, 2020, the Taxpayer filed a timely written protest to the refund denial. The Department denied the claim for refund for periods in 2016 because it believed the request was beyond the statute of limitations for receiving a refund. Generally, the deadline to file a claim for refund is three years from the end of the calendar year in which the payment was originally due. This would mean that the periods in 2016 that were denied needed to be requested before the last day of 2019. The Department argued the Taxpayer’s claim for refund was not timely because its claim was not complete until it provided additional information in April 2020. However, the Taxpayer provided evidence to prove that it had submitted documents related to its claim for refund to the Department a total of three times. The initial claim was made in 2018 but was rejected by the Department as having been improperly filed. Later, a packet of documents with the claim for refund was hand delivered by the Taxpayer on December 30, 2019. Additional documentation was then requested by the Department to support the refund which was provided in April 2020. Though the Department’s Albuquerque office stamped the documents that were hand-delivered on January 3, 2020, the Hearing Officer concluded that there was enough evidence to support that these documents were actually delivered on December 30, 2019. The complete claim for refund, the Hearing Officer determined, was made on this date, even though the Department needed additional supporting documentation to approved the refund. Because this date was before deadline found in the statute of limitations, the Hearing Officer granted the protest and order the denied refund amount paid.