Practitioners are well-aware that lifetime gifts are more tax-efficient than transfers at death. But during the past seven years there's been a possibility that the estate tax might be permanently repealed, so it's been out of vogue for...
Taxes are never fun but unexpected taxes are especially annoying. If a Florida resident sells a painting through a worldwide auction house, which holds the auction in New York, does he need to pay New York income taxes? If a New Hampshire resident...
As the Internal Revenue Code's Section 7520 rate dropped this year to near-record lows (down to 3.2 percent in May 2008), some estate planners began recommending that clients create long-term grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) to lock in a...
With the Internal Revenue Service on the verge of issuing final regulations, more than 17 professional organizations and legal commentators have taken a stand in the ongoing debate on the extent to which trusts and estates can deduct certain costs...
In an effort to provide uniformity and certainty in the valuation of claims for estate tax purposes, the Department of Treasury issued proposed regulations on April 23, 2007, to clarify that post-death events are to be considered in valuing...
The mere words asset protection make some lawyers wince.1 They think asset protection is dirty and those engaged in it are the ambulance chasers of the estate-planning bar. Of course, we all should turn our noses up at lawyers who tightrope walk...
Think back to a time long, long ago, before the adequate disclosure rules of 1997, before the changes in the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax deemed allocation rules of 2001. It was a simpler time. At tax preparation firms all across the...
For the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court has asserted that it not only believes in the taxpayer rights enunciated more than 70 years ago by Judge Learned Hand but also that the court embraces this position even more firmly than the eminent judge...
