Tax lawyers routinely test proposed transactions against the technical requirements of the Internal Revenue Code. The Tenth Circuit’s recent decision in Liberty Global, Inc. v. United States[1] is a reminder that literal compliance may not always end the analysis. In Liberty Global, the court applied the codified economic substance doctrine to deny a claimed §…
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Income tax planning opportunities using non-grantor trusts have been around a long time, whether focused on state or federal income tax.[1] The One Big Beautiful Bill Act[2] (“OBBBA”) has renewed attention on non-grantor trusts as income tax planning vehicles. This is due to a number of provisions in OBBA that can benefit from including one…
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The administration of inherited qualified retirement accounts can present difficult tax and procedural issues when an estate, rather than an individual, is the beneficiary of the relevant account, which generally occurs by default when an account does not have a designated individual beneficiary. Those issues become particularly important when a decedent’s estate must divide an…
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The practice of “estate planning” covers a broad range of topics, one of which is accounting for gift and estate taxes. From the inception of the estate tax until the early 2000s, when the exemption amount was less than a million dollars, this was a facet of estate planning that practitioners had to evaluate in…
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed a Tax Court opinion dealing with the effect of lifetime transfers by a mother (Mary) to her son (Peter).[1] At issue was the nature of those transfers. On the one hand, Mary Bolles and her estate argued that the transfers constituted loans from Mary to Peter. On…
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What are the rights of a creditor to LLC interests to satisfy their claim? That question was at issue in a recent opinion from the Alabama Supreme Court.[1] In that case, the creditor received a “charging order” (discussed below) requiring that distributions from the LLC made to the debtor be instead transferred to the clerk…
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Josh Sage discussed the Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”) in his January 2021 article,[1] and I wrote a follow-up summary last July.[2] The CTA requires certain U.S. businesses, absent an exemption, to file beneficial ownership information with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”). This could result in burdensome reporting obligations for those businesses. As I discussed…
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As of September 14, 2020, Devin Mills joins Edmondson Sage Allen, PLLC as an associate attorney. Prior to working at Edmondson Sage Allen, PLLC, Devin was an associate practicing in tax and estate planning with Baker Donelson in its Jackson, Mississippi office. Devin received his law degree from the University of Mississippi and completed his…
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