Other Matters: The Appellate Tax Board Should Consider Encouraging the Use of Mediation To Resolve More Cases.

Auditors found that for the 139 appeals closed through mediation during the audit period, it took a median time of 149 days from the date the appeal was initially filed to close it. Before implementing the Mediation Program, the median time to resolve a dispute was 328 days.

Overview

During our audit, we determined that the Appellate Tax Board’s (ATB’s) use of mediation to resolve appeals has had a positive impact on how quickly certain appeals are closed. For the 139 of 158 appeals in mediation that were closed during our audit period, the average median cycle time (the time from the date the appeal was filed to the date it was closed) was 149 days, in contrast to the average median cycle time of 328 days for the 8,205 appeals that ATB processed during fiscal years 2014 and 2015 before the implementation of the Mediation Program. This 179-day difference in cycle time (328 – 149) resulted in a total reduction of approximately 24,900 days for these 139 appeals. Since the ATB application only offers mediation on Commissioner of Revenue appeals, the 139 closed appeals represented only approximately 2.7% of the 5,137 total cases⁷ closed by ATB during the audit period. We understand that some appeals may be too complex to be good candidates for mediation, but we believe that ATB should consider taking whatever measures are possible to expand the use of mediation for other appeal types.

ATB’s comment on this issue was “We will continue to explore ways to encourage parties to request participation in our mediation program.”

7.     For this calculation, we considered the total number of cases to be 5,137, as discussed previously. in “Audit Objectives, Scope, and Methodology.”

Date published:	February 9, 2021