William Byrnes' Tax, Wealth, and Risk Intelligence

Valuation discounts will always be a disputed issue between taxpayers and the IRS, but as illustrated by the recently published Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case, a properly timed gift can still qualify for a discount.  The parents contributed cash, securities, and real property to an LLC and then transferred LLC interests to a trust (“the children’s trust”) naming their children as beneficiaries.

The IRS rejected the valuation discount, claiming that the parents did not make a gift of the LLC interests to the trusts as they claimed, but instead made an indirect gift of the assets owned by the LLC.  The IRS also argued that, even if the LLC were funded prior to the gifting of the LLC interests to the children, the transaction’s two steps—transfer of assets to the LLC and the gift of the LLC interest to the children’s trust—were really a single transaction, an indirect gift of the assets, under the step transaction doctrine.   Read this complete analysis of the impact at AdvisorFX (sign up for a free trial subscription with full access to all of the planning libraries and client presentations if you are not already a subscriber).