The Internal Revenue Service has issued Notice 2016-19, effective Feb. 11, 2016, which delays the filing requirement of Form 8971 (and any accompanying Schedule A). The filing requirement was originally imposed by Section 6035 of the “Highway Bill” (Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015), which was signed into law in the summer of 2015 and now requires beneficiaries of estates to use the finally determined estate tax value of any property they receive as their income tax basis and imposes a reporting obligation on executors to provide such values to the IRS and the beneficiaries.
Executors that are required to file or furnish such statement(s) prior to March 31, 2016 don’t need to do so until March 31, 2016. This further extends a previous extension granted by the IRS in Notice 2015-57, which delayed the due date for any statement required to be filed with the IRS or provided to a beneficiary prior to Feb. 29, 2016, until Feb. 29, 2016. The purpose of this most recent extension is “to provide executors and such other persons the opportunity to review the proposed regulations to be issued under sections 1014(f) and 6035 before preparing” the requisite statements. The IRS doesn’t provide a date on which the proposed regulations will be issued but states that they’ll be issued “very shortly.”
