Page:Hook v. United States.pdf/8

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analyzing whether § 1346(a)(1) provided the court with subject matter jurisdiction over the claims asserted in the amended complaint.

B. The Tibbs declaration

In support of its motion to dismiss the amended complaint, the government submitted the declaration of an IRS Insolvency Advisor, Yvonne M. Tibbs. Ms. Tibbs summarized plaintiffs’ lengthy litigation history regarding their tax liabilities, compared the accounting in their amended complaint with IRS records, and stated that although plaintiffs had paid $662,476.45, they jointly and severally still owed over $700,000 each. Attached to Ms. Tibbs’s declaration were printouts from the IRS’s Integrated Data Retrieval System that summarized plaintiffs’ liabilities and payments.

Ms. Hook contends that, because the court refused to exclude Ms. Tibbs’s declaration, it should have converted the government’s Rule 12(b) motion to dismiss into a Rule 56 motion for summary judgment, which would have required the court to give the parties “a reasonable opportunity to present all the material . . . pertinent to the motion,” Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(d). This argument is devoid of merit. As the district court explained, the government attacked the factual basis of the court’s subject matter jurisdiction, and in that scenario, courts enjoy "wide discretion to allow affidavits, other documents, and a limited evidentiary hearing to resolve disputed jurisdictional facts" without converting the Rule 12(b)(1) motion into a Rule 56 motion. Stuart v. Colo. Interstate Gas Co., 271 F.3d 1221, 1225 (10th Cir. 2001) (internal quotation marks omitted).

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