In plain terms: the letter says you could have kept working from home, so nothing was suspended. The statute has no telework exception and no "comparable operations" test; those four factors were written into the IRS's Notice on March 1, 2021, after every 2020 quarter had ended. A telework order is itself an order limiting commerce: it closed your office to your staff and to your customers. New York ordered a 100 percent reduction of the in-person workforce; Pennsylvania ordered telework "unless impossible"; Colorado held offices to 10 percent; the federal government capped its own buildings at 25 percent. Whether the work got done from living rooms is a different question from whether an order shut the office. This page shows what the orders said, and what the United States and a federal court have said "partial suspension" means.
The employer could have continued comparable operations through telework.
As stated in the Service's letters, Forms 886-A and memoranda
The statute has no telework exception
The Suspension Clause, section 2301(c)(2)(A)(ii)(I) of the CARES Act and section 3134(c)(2)(A)(ii)(I) of the Internal Revenue Code, contains no telework exception and no "comparable operations" test. A telework mandate is itself an order limiting commerce: it closed the employer's offices to its workforce and its customers. The four "comparable operations" factors of Q&A-16 of the Notice (Notice 2021-20, 2021-11 I.R.B. 922) first appeared on March 1, 2021; nothing resembling them appeared in the Service's FAQs as posted on April 29, 2020 or as revised June 19, 2020, which stated the telework rule without them.1
The orders
New York's Executive Order 202.8 (Mar. 20, 2020) ordered a 100 percent reduction of the in-person workforce (Ex. NY-002); Oregon's Executive Order 20-12 (Mar. 23, 2020) prohibited office work wherever telework was available (Ex. OR-007); Pennsylvania's Mitigation, Enforcement and Immunity Order of November 23, 2020 ordered telework "unless impossible" (Ex. PA-022); Colorado's First Amended Public Health Order 20-36 (Nov. 17, 2020) held offices to 10 percent and Washington's Proclamation 20-25.8 (Nov. 15, 2020) held professional services to 25 percent in the winter of 2020 (Exs. CO-081, WA-047); Rule 5(8) of the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration's emergency rules of October 14, 2020 made remote work a legal duty where feasible; New Jersey's Executive Order 192 (Oct. 28, 2020) governed every workplace that stayed open (Ex. SEC-10-021); and Executive Order 13991 and OMB Memorandum M-21-15 placed every federal building under masking and exposure controls and capped it at 25 percent occupancy from January 2021 (Exs. FED-060, FED-270). Each ordered the employer to stop operating its offices as offices. An employer whose office function was terminated by order and whose workforce was dispersed to living rooms by order had a more than nominal portion of its operations delayed, interrupted or terminated, whatever the productivity of the living rooms.2
The United States' account
The United States told the District Court, in its opposition and cross-motion for summary judgment in Stenson Tamaddon, LLC v. IRS, No. 2:24-cv-01123-SPL (D. Ariz. Jan. 6, 2025), ECF No. 44 ("Doc. 44"), that an employer is partially suspended "if it was required to suspend certain operations for certain purposes." Doc. 44 at 15. And Tri-State Memorial Hospital v. United States, No. 2:25-cv-0181-TOR, ECF No. 38 (E.D. Wash. May 28, 2026) ("Tri-State"), holds what a partial suspension is, with no exception for portions that could be replaced by other means:
Based on the parties agreed upon definitions, the plain text of the statute, and the ordinary dictionary definitions, a "partial suspension" is a temporary delay, interruption, or termination of a portion an employer's business. The language is plain ...
Tri-State, ECF No. 38, at 9
The Service's ground answers a question the statute does not ask, whether the employer coped, in place of the one it does, whether an order suspended a portion of the operation.3 The twenty-seven industry analyses on this site show, function by function, that the portion the telework orders suspended was the office itself; the analyses of professional and information services, financial services and staffing and support services take the office function through each of the six quarters.
The question the statute asks is whether an order suspended part of your operation, not whether you found a way to cope. A telework order closed your office as an office: your staff could not work there and your customers could not come there. That is a delay, interruption or termination of a portion of your business, which is what the United States and the Tri-State court say "partial suspension" means. The "comparable operations" factors the letter applies were added to the IRS's Notice on March 1, 2021 and are not in the statute.