Tilcon Massachusetts, Inc. v. Commissioner of Revenue

One of the verities of tax practice in Massachusetts is that an application for abatement of taxes, to be timely filed, must be placed in the hands of the assessors or the Commissioner of Revenue, as the case may be, before expiration of the deadline date. Mailing it on the deadline date is not good enough if the application for abatement arrives after the due date. We are invited to reexamine that rule in the context of State as compared to local taxation, and in the light of comparatively recent directives concerning the filing of State tax returns.

*265We sketch the facts behind the…