More Ways Florida Bankers Misapplied the APA

Abstract

In a previous article, I described one set of reasons why the D.C. district court misapplied the arbitrary and capricious standard of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) in rejecting a challenge to regulations requiring banks to report to the IRS interest earned on accounts held by non-resident aliens. This article describes additional errors in the court’s APA analysis, particularly its failure to apply the requirement that an agency must consider alternative approaches to achieving its goal and that the agency must provide a satisfactory explanation for why it rejected those alternatives.

Keywords: administrative law, state farm, arbitrary and capricious standard