Every year, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) releases its “Dirty Dozen.” The Dirty Dozen, as written previously about by my colleague, Devin Mills,[1] is a list of twelve prevalent scams the IRS bodes taxpayers to be weary of during tax season, as they “put taxpayers, businesses, and the tax professional community at risk of losing…
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Small businesses predominate the United States.[1] Many of those businesses operate through entities taxed as partnerships.[2] Those entities may be general partnerships, limited partnerships, LLC’s, or other state law entity types.[3] Many partnerships are formed as part of family and estate planning. Some benefits of the use of partnerships in estate planning include, but are…
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Split dollar life insurance arrangements can take on a number of forms, and the exact structure of the arrangement determines the tax consequences, which can become complicated quickly. In a recent case out of the District Court of Ohio, the court held that an insurance arrangement between a single member C corporation, Peter E. McGowan…
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Currently (and since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017), we, like many other practitioners, have seen an incredible uptick in inclusion planning[1] instead of the traditional exclusion planning (getting assets out of one’s taxable estate). A primary driving force for this major shift was the essential doubling of the estate tax exemption (from…
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Shortly before his passing, Benjamin Franklin uttered one of his more infamous quotes, “In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” With the certainty of death implicitly comes another: everyone will transfer his or her wealth, whether in life or after death. How a person transfers wealth will affect how the other certainty,…
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The Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) issued Private Letter Ruling (“PLR”) 201647001 in November of 2016, in which it took the position that a modification to an irrevocable grantor trust to add a discretionary income tax reimbursement clause did not change the beneficial interests in the trust, and therefore did not result in a gift, because…
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Recently, there seems to have been a higher number of cases than usual coming down from courts regarding Tax Court jurisdictional issues. My colleague Parker Durham covered a few of them in a recent article.[1] In a recent case out of the Court of Federal Claims, yet another jurisdictional issue arose.[2] In the present case,…
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Taxpayers who are issued a notice of deficiency by the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) have ninety (90) days from the date such notice of deficiency is mailed to file a petition with the Tax Court for a redetermination of the deficiency.[1] Last year, the Tax Court dismissed several cases for lack of jurisdiction when the…
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Monetized Installment Sales, as previously written upon by Gray Edmondson,[1] have been subject to increased scrutiny by the IRS in recent years, making its “Dirty Dozen” list in each of the last three years.[2] The IRS remains on the offensive in scrutinizing such transactions, issuing proposed regulation under Internal Revenue Code Section 6011 in August…
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Many individuals take out life insurance policies for valid planning reasons which later are no longer needed or desirable. Alternatively, the policy owner may need current liquidity. While many policies can be surrendered for their cash value or the owner may take loans against the policy, there may be other options. One of those options…
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