Next year, no matter how preoccupied the federal government is and no matter who is president, a new federal estate tax law is quite likely to be adopted. If it isn't, on Jan. 1, 2010, the U.S. federal estate tax will disappear at least for...
Robert Craig Knievel, purportedly nicknamed by police after an arrest for stealing hubcaps off cars, was born on Oct. 17, 1938 in Butte, Mont., and died in Clearwater, Fla., on Nov. 20, 2007, at the age of 69. His will, recently made available to...
Multi-participant trusts1 have become immensely popular. These trusts replace the single, all-powerful trustee with a host of independent decisionmakers, all deriving their authority directly from the trust instrument. At first, we saw multi...
The model for a managing directed trustee (MDT) comes from organizations like family offices and private trust companies (PTCs) that evolved, in part, to support and coordinate a family's trustees and other financial services providers. Family...
My message is not for the easily offended, but, in the closing months of 2008, I feel this must be said: Congress still has not done anything about the estate tax law. If Congress doesn't act very soon, each one of us should ask ourselves: If we...
The Internal Revenue Service has almost literally thrown the (Internal Revenue Code) book at family limited partnerships (FLPs), seeking to negate their validity, and thereby knock out discounts and reap higher tax payments. It has had some of its...
The intention behind incentive trusts is excellent; the rigidity of these trusts is not. It's time to ditch the inflexible incentive trusts and instead learn how to fashion a principle trust. Rather than strict rules for distributions, a principle...
As practitioners are acutely aware, the Internal Revenue Service has pursued a variety of arguments during the past decade to attack family limited partnerships (FLPs). The IRS has deployed Internal Revenue Code Sections 2036, 2701, 2702 and 2704...
During the life of a trust, its tax status may change from grantor to non-grantor, or vice versa. This may be deliberate (a powerholder relinquishes a power that caused the trust to be a grantor trust), unintentional (a change in trustee) or even...
