This case began in the trial court as a constitutional challenge to OCGA § 48-6-20 et seq., Georgia’s intangible personal property tax statute, but has become an appeal concerning the doctrine of mootness in Georgia law. Lombard Corporation (hereinafter “Lombard”), which had been assessed a tax of $56.29, began the action by filing suit against Collins, in his official capacity as Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Revenue, and Scott, in his official capacity as Tax Commissioner of DeKalb County. Lombard sought a declaration that the intangible personal property tax statute was unconstitutional, and a permanent injunction forbidding Collins to make any further assessments and forbidding Scott to attempt to collect the tax from Lombard. While the suit was pending, the General Assembly repealed the intangible personal property tax statute and a third party associated neither with Lombard nor with either defendant paid the taxes assessed against Lombard. The trial court, without ruling on the constitutional issue, granted the defendants’ motion for dismissal of the suit as moot. An appeal by Lombard to this Court was transferred to the Court of Appeals because the constitutional issue had not been decided in the trial court. The Court of Appeals
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first posed a series of certified questions
1
which this Court, by an unpublished order, declined to answer because the answers to those questions were not necessary to resolution of the appeal. The Court of Appeals then reversed the trial court’s dismissal of the suit as moot, creating a “public policy exception” to the mootness doctrine, holding “that it violates public policy of this state to allow a case to be mooted by the intervention of a third-party who is not a party to the litigation, . . . that a legitimate exception exists to the usual rules of mootness under these existing circumstances, and that the suit was not rendered moot by the payment of the tax assessments by the third party.”
Lombard Corp. v. Scott,
1. At the outset, we deem it appropriate to clarify the doctrine of mootness. In
Chastain v. Baker,
The problem with denominating cases which present an issue capable of repetition yet evading review as moot, but subject to an exception to the mootness doctrine, is that the exception is inconsistent with the holding in
Chastain
that dismissal of moot cases is mandatory. A sound analytical approach to the doctrine of mootness, one which avoids the contradiction and which we now hold to be correct, was enunciated in
In the Interest of I. B.,
2. Applying the doctrine of mootness as explained above to this case yields a result of mootness. While the issue between the parties, Lombard’s liability for a specific tax assessment, ceased to be a live controversy when the tax was paid, the underlying issue raised by the suit was the constitutionality of the statute. If that underlying issue were to recur, it would not necessarily evade review: the expectation that someone would pay the taxes in another suit is too speculative to rescue the constitutional issue from mootness (see In the Interest ofl. B., supra); and the underlying issue in this case could be raised in a suit for a refund, an action not susceptible of the third-party involvement in this case. 2 Thus, under this State’s existing law, there is nothing about this case that prevents it from being moot.
3. The remaining question is whether the “public policy exception” to the mootness doctrine created in this case by the Court of Appeals is valid. We conclude that it is not, for two reasons. First, the concern expressed by the Court of Appeals, that citizens of this State might be denied their access to the courts by the action of wealthy individuals who will “buy-out” lawsuits to prevent the consideration of certain issues, does not stand up to analysis under the doctrine of mootness as explained in the first division of this opinion: the issue of the constitutionality of the tax statute is one which does not evade review because it can be brought up by anyone who claims a right to a refund; indeed, that claim could have been kept in this case so as to force a decision on constitutionality. Second, the notion of an exception to the mootness doctrine which would permit a court to consider a case notwithstanding that the case is moot is inconsistent with the concept of mootness as a jurisdictional matter. If the case were moot, public policy alone would not be sufficient to bestow jurisdiction over *123 it. Because the creation of ad hoc exceptions for individual cases is unnecessary and undesirable in that they foster uncertainty in the law and inappropriately serve to expand the jurisdiction of the court applying such exceptions, we cannot approve of them. We hold, therefore, that the Court of Appeals erred in creating the “public policy exception” to the mootness doctrine on which it based its decision in this case.
Judgment reversed.