The high court said Monday that it will hear Scott's case and a similar one arising from the California courts.
In both cases, the IRS rejected claims that the taxpayers were incompetent when they overpaid taxes and that the same incompetence caused refund applications to be filed too late to meet IRS deadlines.
Scott, a former California attorney and liquor dealer, made payments totaling $30,096 for his 1984 taxes. Five years later, he applied for a refund saying he owed no taxes for 1984.
The IRS turned him down, saying he filed after the deadlines of three years after a return was filed or two years after the tax was paid.
Scott sued, saying years of alcoholism made him mentally incompetent and unable to file returns, and won his cases in federal court in Hawaii and later in a federal appeals court, but the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court, saying federal law does not permit deadline exemptions.
Scott, who says he is owed thousands of dollars in interest as well as the $30,000-plus refund, has said he will argue his own case before the high court.
His case is coupled with another brought by Marian Brockamp of Prescott, Ariz., who said her father was 93 and senile when he wrote the IRS a check for $7,000 in 1984 instead of the $700 he intended to pay. Brockamp discovered the error after her father died in 1988 and sued when the IRS wouldn't pay.