September/October 2011

Cover Story

Valuing Claims: Is There a Methodology? By C. Arthur Robinson II & John T. Midgett

Valuation analysis can be thought of as a spectrum with assets having low risk and uncertainty such as cash and marketable securities, to asset classes that involve far greater risk and uncertainty. Your client, the surviving parent of one of the Pan Am passengers possesses a claim against a terrorist state, but dies before the payment of such claim. As part of your client?s estate tax return, how would a claim against a sovereign nation that was a sponsor of a terrorist bombing be valued?

Public Articles

Flexible Family Trusts: Planning Under TRA 2010 to Obtain Flexibility, But Avoid a Disaster

By Mark R. Parthemer

The Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Authorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 has given estate planners, at least temporarily, enhanced and unified million gift, estate, and GST exemptions as well as estate and gift tax exemption ?portability.?

Basis Harvesting

By Terence S. Nunan

For the most part, people do estate planning for two reasons?first, to make certain their assets pass to their intended beneficiaries and, second, to save taxes for their beneficiaries on and after their death. The recent passage of the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010, which provides a million per person estate tax exclusion, has, for most upper middle class persons, made the second objective fairly easy to achieve. For most ?ordinary? well to do persons, the need for and interest in more complicated estate planning devices such as QPRTs, GRATs, and defective trusts would seem diminished in light of this million exclusion.

Does a Federal Tax Lien Take Priority over a Mortgagee?s Lien on Rents? Bloomfield State Bank v. United States

By R. Wilson Freyermuth

In one of the first published decisions to address the relative priority rights of a mortgage lender and the IRS for rents from real estate, a federal appeals court finds for the lender.

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