The article critiques the Tax Court's latest family limited partnership case, Mirowski, as well as the court's Bongard test, which is applied to determine whether or not an FLP falls within the bona fide sales exception of section 2036

Currently, the estate tax does not accurately value the property and transactions that it is meant to cover. Additionally, the marital and charitable deductions do not reflect actual associated transfers, instead skewing their benefits away from their purported beneficiaries. This Article...

The purpose of this article is to propose a simpler verifiable gift tax, to reassert basic principles of transfer taxes, to encourage simple, outright gifts, and to eliminate some of the major abuses in the current gift tax regime. To accomplish these goals, the proposed tax would simplify gift...

In Buder, in a refund action by the widow's estate for overpayment plus interest owing to its erroneous inclusion of a purported QTIP trust, the Eighth Circuit, affirming the district court, agreed that the government was entitled to the defense of equitable recoupment for unpaid estate taxes in...

Despite restrictions on marketability, lottery payments included in a decedent's estate must be valued by the actuarial tables and without a marketability discount. They must be valued by the actuarial tables because: (1) Congress said so (section 7520); (2) the Supreme Court said so (Ithaca...

The problem, here, with accepting successive spousal interests is not that a dual life interest is any more contingent or unreliable a term measurement than a single life interest, which is acceptable under the regulations. Rather, the difficulty is produced by the fact that the spousal interest...

Recently, in Saigh v. Commissioner, the petitioner argued that, while conceding transferee liability up to the value of the property transferred to her from the decedent's estate, she was not liable for interest on that amount running from the estate tax return's due date. She also contended...