Lifestyle & Consumer · The Record
IRS art panel reviewed 195 items claimed at $795,527,954 in meetings closed to the public
Publication 5392 reports 195 items with an aggregate claimed value of $795,527,954 for 2023, and the panel recommended accepting the taxpayer's value on 53 percent of items. Two transparency charges from the Center for Art Law, a missing AAS adoption percentage and a missing charitable-versus-estate split, go unmet in the newest edition's captured text.
The Internal Revenue Service settles what a painting was worth in a room the public cannot enter. Publication 5392, the annual summary report on the Commissioner's Art Advisory Panel, is a routine public account of that work, and the edition captured for this piece covers 2023. "During 2023, the Panel reviewed 195 items with an aggregate taxpayer claimed value of $795,527,954 on 37 taxpayer cases," the report states. The average item carried a claimed value of $4,079,631. The panel recommended accepting the taxpayer's figure on 103 of those items, 53 percent of the items presented, and adjusted the values of 92, or 47 percent. Nobody outside the room watched any of it.
That is stated, and sourced to statute. "Panel meetings are closed to the public since all portions of the meetings concern matters that are exempted from disclosure under the provisions of sections 552b(c)(3), (4), (6) and (7) of Title 5 of the U.S. Code," the report states, tying the closure to the confidentiality of returns required by section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code. The report also describes what the appraisers themselves are kept from seeing: panelists are not told whose return is in front of them, which tax is at issue, what a change in value would do to the bill, or who wrote the appraisal being questioned.
Created in 1968, the panel advises the Art Appraisal Services unit inside the IRS Independent Office of Appeals. Membership runs to as many as 25 experts who "serve without compensation and provide advisory opinions," the agency's art appraisal services page states; they give oral opinions, reach a consensus, and issue no written report. Two different dollar lines govern what gets there. IRM 4.48.2 directs employees to send AAS any case in which a taxpayer has appraised a single work at $50,000 or more; art that goes on to the panel generally has "individual values above $150,000," the appraisal services page says, with AAS holding discretion over what is sent. The advice does not stay advice - under the manual, after AAS review, "these recommendations become the position of the IRS."
The claim being tested here belongs to the Center for Art Law, which published a spotlight on the panel that the research file for this piece dates to June 6, 2019. The complaint was not about the existence of the panel or the difficulty of valuing art; it was about the thinning of the one document outsiders get. The spotlight makes three specific charges: that the report stopped disclosing the percentage of panel recommendations AAS adopted; that recommendations appear only as gross numbers, grouped as a count of increased items and a count of decreased items; and that the report does not separate revised values on charitable items from those on estate or gift items. A claim about a document is a claim that can be checked against the document.
Two of the three can be checked against the captured text of the newest edition, and neither is met. In the text of Publication 5392 captured for this piece, the 2023 numbers arrive as totals - items reviewed, claimed value, cases, accepted, adjusted - with no adoption rate for AAS anywhere in that text, and no breakdown separating donated art from art in estates and gifts. A reader who wants to know whether the IRS followed its experts, or which kind of taxpayer absorbed the 92 adjustments, will not find either answer in that text. The research file for this piece dates the charges to June 6, 2019; the edition captured for this piece covers 2023.
That the adoption rate is publishable is not a theory. The law firm Grossman LLP reported that "in 2012, AAS fully adopted 96.5% of the Panel's recommendations." The same account puts the 2012 caseload at 444 items "worth over $280 million (according to taxpayer valuations)." A number that precise about how much sway the panel actually held was once in public circulation; the captured text of the current report offers nothing equivalent.
Set the two IRS editions beside each other and the case for a breakdown gets stronger. The 2021 edition reports that "During Fiscal Year 2020, the Panel reviewed 43 items with an aggregate taxpayer valuation of $57,672,000 on 14 taxpayer cases." The panel accepted 12 of those items, 28 percent, adjusted 31, and recommended total net adjustments of $12,372,565 to the claimed values - "a 21.45 percent increase." Three years on, acceptance had climbed to 53 percent, on a claimed value nearly fourteen times larger. In fiscal 2020 the panel's net finding was that taxpayers had undervalued their art. The summary text captured for this piece does not carry the matching net figure for 2023, so this article does not state it.
View the data
| Value (items) | |
|---|---|
| 2012 | 444 items |
| FY2020 | 43 items |
| 2023 | 195 items |
Source: IRS Publication 5392, editions covering 2023 and fiscal 2020; Grossman LLP for calendar 2012 · Daily Pol graphic
Read as analysis of the two editions, the gap is structural. A year of art valuation compressed into grouped totals can hold two opposite stories at once: values raised on donated works and values cut on estates would offset in the aggregate, and the aggregate is all a reader gets. That is what the spotlight's charge about grouping and the missing charitable-versus-estate split describes, and the swing between the two editions - 28 percent acceptance on 43 items, 53 percent on 195 - shows how far the top-line figures can move without explaining themselves.
The two editions also cite different law for the same closed door. The 2021 edition grounds the determination in section 10(d) of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, at 5 U.S.C. App. 2; the current edition cites section 10(a)(2) of the same act, at 5 U.S.C. § 1009. The rest of the sentence, including the section 6103 confidentiality rationale, reads the same in both.
The Center for Art Law set the reporting complaint inside a wider one: "the opacity of the Panel and its procedure is a recurrent point of criticism," its spotlight states, given the sums at stake for taxpayer and government alike. The same passage asks whether the panel's own adjustments hold to the level of objectivity it strives to correct for in the market. No IRS official is named anywhere in the records this piece rests on: Publication 5392, the manual section and the appraisal services page all speak institutionally, and this article does not supply a name they do not carry. The piece is built entirely from published documents and carries no comment from the IRS.
What a reader can check next is dated. Both editions used here were captured from irs.gov on September 5, 2026: the edition covering 2023 from the publication's standing address, and the fiscal 2020 edition from an address under irs.gov/pub/irs-prior. Daily Pol's prediction, checkable on irs.gov by June 30, 2027: the next edition will again report grouped totals with no percentage of recommendations AAS adopted and no split between charitable items and estate or gift items. The claimed value that went before the panel in 2023 was $795,527,954. How much of the panel's advice the IRS took is still not in the text captured for this piece.