Tax Court is equally as likely to throw out IRS or taxpayer experts, professors argue
New academic research suggests that there may be more behind a Tax Court estate tax valuation than simply “splitting the baby,” and it’s not just the increasing sophistication of the court, counsel, and BV experts. Using models from prior literature as well as an updated data set, the authors of the just-posted article “Asset and [...]
Tax Court judges may be open to tax-affecting business values
Moderator Jay Fishman (Financial Research Associates) took on the “puzzling, controversial” topic of tax-affecting with the panel of Tax Court judges in Part III of BVR’s Tax Summit last Friday, hosted by Georgetown Univ. Law Center. Although none of the judges has presided over a case in which the issue came up—“I’m looking forward to it,” [...]
Reminder: Expert reports still discoverable in Tax Court
The long-awaited amendments to Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, made effective at the beginning of this year, have largely been “great,” according to attorney Edward M. Robbins (Hochman Salkin Rettig Toscher & Perez, P.C.), who presented in last week’s “Lawyers Roundtable,” part 2 of BVR’s 2011 Tax Summit, moderated by Jay Fishman (Financial Research Associates). [...]
Tax Court judges’ panel highlights Georgetown Law/BVR On-line Tax Symposia
This and other questions continue to bedevil estate and gift tax practitioners with clients who own businesses. Business appraisers whose valuations support these clients’ claims are being challenged more frequently than ever. For example: are the guideline public company method and its use of comparable entities/transactions under heightened scrutiny by the Tax Court? And what [...]
FLPs with passive assets are still the most vulnerable
Recent cases concerning the viability of taxpayers’ transfers to family limited partnerships (FLPs) as “bona fide” for legitimate, non-tax business purposes have been fairly successful in the Tax Court of late—even when the transfers have involved assets that don’t require active management. Estate of Black, for instance, upheld an FLP in which the partners held the [...]
Another blow to IRS: 9th Circuit upholds defined value clause
As reported in prior BVLaw Alerts, the Tax Court delivered a first blow to the IRS’s long-held opposition to formula-defined value clauses in Estate of Petter v. Commissioner. The government appealed, and earlier this month the 9th Circuit might have buried the “void for public policy” argument, as the IRS didn’t even assert this angle, [...]
Recent tax court case popular in the blogosphere
Gallagher Estate v. Comr., (T.C. Memo. 2011-148) engendered at least two spirited analyses online last week. On the blog The Business Valuation Reviewers Handbook attorney Paul Hood remarks: This is a very interesting valuation case because if you didn’t read the opinion except for the numbers, you’d have concluded that the estate’s appraiser prevailed! But [...]
Two new Tax Court cases sidestep subsequent events, finding dueling experts indicated lack of reasonably certain value
When will a wide divergence between opposing experts work to disadvantage both? Two new decisions by the U.S. Tax Court, in opinions written on the same day (April 28, 2011) by Judge Cohen, suggest that “the differences between the experts as to the correct value to be placed on a claim against the estate were [...]
How can your tax client impress the IRS? The answer may surprise you…
Credible data, well-supported conclusions, compliance with applicable professional standards: It almost goes without saying that these are the minimal qualities that any business appraisal must meet to support estate and gift tax planning. But what’s the first thing that happens after a field agent refers an appraisal to an IRS BV specialist? “We will read [...]
US Tax Court Judge Laro and Shannon Pratt hit the market with their updated Business Valuation & Federal Taxation
This is the must-have text in the field from Judge David Laro and Shannon Pratt. Besides the essentials the 2nd Edition (the first came out in 2005) includes coverage of: Personal versus enterprise goodwill New materials on transfer pricing and customs valuations and how recent markets have affected both the income and market approaches Coverage [...]
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