William A. SCHMIDT, t/a A. J. Schmidt & Company, Petitioner, v. COMMONWEALTH of Pennsylvania, Respondent.
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
Argued May 18, 1981. Decided July 10, 1981.
433 A.2d 456
(10) The terms used in this nondiscrimination clause shall have the same meaning as in the Contract Compliance Regulations issued by the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission,
(11) Contractor obligations under this clause are limited to the Contractor‘s facilities within Pennsylvania, or, where the сontract is for purchase of goods manufactured outside of Pennsylvania, the facilities at which such goods arе actually produced.
Robert Patrick Coyne, Deputy Atty. Gen., for respondent.
Before ROBERTS, NIX, LARSEN, FLAHERTY and KAUFFMAN, JJ.
FLAHERTY, Justice.
This is an appeal from an order of the Commonwealth Court1 which affirmed an order of the Board of Finance and Revenue dismissing an appeal from a reassessment of sales and use taxes levied upon the appellant, William A. Schmidt, t/a A. J. Schmidt and Company. A reаssessment decision and order was issued by the Department of Revenue‘s Board of Review (hereinafter Department) pursuant to Section 232 of the Tax Reform Code of 1971.2 Subsequently, the Board of Finance and Revenue received а petition for review of the reassessment decision. The petition was dismissed, however, on grounds that the Board of Finаnce and Revenue lacked jurisdiction over the appeal because the petition was not timely filed. Thе sole issue upon the instant appeal is whether the petition was, in fact, untimely.
Section 234 of the Tax Reform Code,
Apрellant contends, however, that the Department had a duty to formally notify him of the date of mailing of the reassessmеnt decision and that, in default of such notice, the date of mailing of the subsequent notice of reassessment should be regarded as the start of the sixty-day appeal period. Since the notice of reassessment was dated March 24, 1978, the petition was timely filed if the latter date commenced the appeal period.
Certainly, it is reasonable for the legislature to provide that the date of mailing of a reassessment decision shall commence the period for appeal. Implicit, however, is the duty of the Department to advise the taxpayer of the dаte of mailing. Without such notification, a taxpayer can have no reliable basis for knowing the number of days remaining in whiсh to file a petition for review. At the extreme, a taxpayer receiving a decision from the Department сould hand-carry a petition for review to the Board of Finance and Revenue the same day without knowing whether the petition would be timely filed, since the date of mailing would be unknown to him. In the instant case, the reassessment decision mаiled to appellant indicated a decision date of March 21, 1978. Notwithstanding, appellant cannot be chаrged with the presumption that such was also the date of mailing. Indeed, a taxpayer acquainted with the pace of bureaucratic action might reasonably assume that a governmental department would rarely so hasten tо mail a decision that the mailing date would be the same as the decision date.
The Commonwealth contends that the postmark on an envelope carrying a decision in adequate to indicate the mailing date. We disagree. At the time of receiving a
We do not believe that the legislature intended Section 234 to serve as a vehicle whereby an appeаl could be dismissed, after reference to the Department‘s internal records revealing the mailing date, when the dеnial of such an appeal would be manifestly unjust to the taxpayer who was never informed of the mailing date. Knowledge of a decision‘s mailing date is essential to the taxpayer, and the effort required of the Department to indicate the relevant date on the decision or transmittal letter is negligible; hence, the legislature could only have contemplated that the Department would furnish the information that is crucial to the functioning of Section 234. In the instant case, thе Department‘s failure to provide the requisite notice of the decision‘s mailing date justified appellant‘s reliаnce on March 24, 1978, the date of the subsequently mailed notice of reassessment, as the commencement of the period for appeal.
Order reversed.
ROBERTS, J., filed a concurring opinion.
O‘BRIEN, C. J., and WILKINSON, J., did not participate in the consideration or decision of this case.
ROBERTS, Justice, concurring.
Mr. Justice Roberts concurs in the result, believing that the mailing of a dated notice of reassessment three days after the mailing of an undated notice of decision created an ambiguity which on this record should be resolved in favor of the taxpayer.