Publix Heiress Tax Case Signals Continued IRS Supervisory Issues

Allegations against IRS personnel laid out in Julia “Julie” Jenkins Fancelli’s recent filing in the US District Court for the Middle District of Florida are liable to trigger a bit of stress for beleaguered managers at the agency’s Large Business and International Division.

The new allegations bear an uncomfortable similarity to backdating accusations made years ago in conservation easements cases, as an IRS auditor appears to have altered a document that a supervisor had previously signed off on—in this case, a summons addressed to a financial institution.

At a minimum, the government’s response to Fancelli’s filing should candidly acknowledge that the IRS failed to comply with sound tax administration practices. The IRS should revisit the training it provides to auditors on obtaining and documenting supervisory approvals.

In addition, to ensure the integrity of its records, IRS leadership and IT personnel should explore implementing controls to “lock” electronically signed documents, to preclude staff from purposely or even inadvertently editing them post-execution.

Case Background

An LB&I auditor in October notified Fancelli—known as the heiress to the Publix Super Markets Inc. fortune, and as a controversial political figure who funded the rally preceding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol—of a third-party summons issued to a bank for a broad swathe of her financial records, purportedly pursuant to an information request from Italian tax authorities under the US-Italy tax treaty of 2009.

The initial summons pertained to a different person, was issued to a bank that Fancelli never patronized, and even cited a different foreign country. The IRS’s mistake is problematic from a privacy and disclosure standpoint for the misidentified taxpayers, but what allegedly happened next was worse.

Fancelli claims her representative called the auditor about the summons a few days after receiving it, and that the auditor then issued an amended notice and summons—which bore the same issue date and return date as the original summons. The timestamp on the electronic signature of the required IRS approver also remained unchanged.

This means that, at least on its face, the amended Fancelli third-party summons was “issued” before it was actually issued, and “approved” by a supervisor before it was actually prepared.

Fancelli filed a petition to quash the summons on Oct. 27, contending that this “backdating” renders the summons abusive and invalid under United States v. Powell and its progeny. In 1964, the US Supreme Court held in Powell that for the IRS to enforce an administrative summons, it must ordinarily make a four-part showing that the:

• Underlying investigation is conducted pursuant to a legitimate purpose
• Summons is relevant to the purpose
• Information sought isn’t already within the IRS’s possession
• Administrative steps required by the Internal Revenue Code have been followed

Fancelli argued that the auditor’s failure to obtain proper supervisory approval for the amended summons comprises “non-compliance with required administrative steps,” and that the fourth Powell prong therefore wasn’t met.

The government hasn’t yet responded to this petition, so the IRS’s side of the story hasn’t been told. It is plausible, for example, that the supervisor expressed approval to summons the correct bank information at or about the time that the summons identifying the wrong bank information was e-signed; that everyone missed the clerical error; and that the line-auditor fixed the error without thinking very much of it.

But even in such a charitable telling, this means an IRS auditor would have gone into an executed document and changed its content without indicating that changes postdated the execution. And, to be clear, the mangled paper trail means that it’s impossible, based on currently known facts, to discern whether supervisory approval was obtained to summons the second bank at all.

Familiar Claims

There is a bit of déjà vu in all this, because similar document integrity issues arose over the years in various cases involving conservation easements. In those cases, penalty assessments required supervisory approval, and controversy ensued when a number of taxpayers alleged that IRS backdated documents to improperly suggest that supervisors timely signed off on penalties.

A February 2024 letter and news release from the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman echoed the assertion that multiple IRS employees “improperly backdated” penalty approval records (although, in those documents, the supervisors themselves reportedly wrote in dates preceding the actual dates of execution).

Full disclosure: I worked in the IRS Office of Chief Counsel from 2023 to mid-2025. For present purposes, I’ll defer to IRS overseers’ public-record assessment of the matters. In any event, IRS leadership made a commitment in the wake of the easements controversy to improve risk management processes—and, ultimately, to implement measures to ensure that IRS paperwork is “fully valid and reliable.”

The amended Fancelli summons seems to be at odds with that commitment. Any after-the-fact alteration of a signed IRS document at minimum presents a risk of violating rules—like those requiring supervisory approval of enforcement actions—that are there to protect taxpayers.

That doesn’t mean IRS personnel need to be pilloried here, particularly absent any finding of intentional violation of the rules. Nor does it necessarily follow that Fancelli should prevail in her petition to quash, because the district court needs to assess whether administrative steps required by the tax code have been followed and whether the rest of the Powell showings to support summons enforcement have been made.

However, the irregularities with this amended bank summons suggest that further improvements to IRS operations are warranted. This case may be a warning sign that IRS personnel need more effective training on supervisory approvals and document integrity issues, particularly given recent staffing challenges and turnover of IRS managers.

The case is Jenkins Fancelli v. United States, M.D. Fla., No. 8:25-cv-02918, petition to quash summons 10/27/25.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.

Author Information

Joseph A. Rillotta is a partner at Meadows Collier and has served as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice’s Tax Division and as counselor to former IRS Commissioners John Koskinen and Danny Werfel.

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