The Department of the Treasury has released the Treasury Green Book  for Fiscal Year 2017, which provides explanations of the President’s budget proposals.  One such proposal (remember…these are just proposals, not actual changes in the law) that may affect your estate planning, if passed, is found on page 187 of the Green Book and is re-printed here for your convenience:

SIMPLIFY GIFT TAX EXCLUSION FOR ANNUAL GIFTS

Current Law

The first $14,000 of gifts made to each donee in 2016 is excluded from the donor’s taxable gifts (and therefore does not use up any of the donor’s applicable exclusion amount for gift and estate tax purposes). This annual gift tax exclusion is indexed for inflation and there is no limit on the number of donees to whom such excluded gifts may be made by a donor in any one year. To qualify for this exclusion, each gift must be of a present interest rather than a future interest in the donated property. For these purposes, a present interest is an unrestricted right to the immediate use, possession, or enjoyment of property or the income from property (including life estates and term interests). Generally, a contribution to a trust for the donee is a future interest.

Reasons for Change

To take advantage of this annual gift tax exclusion without having to transfer the property outright to the donee, a donor often contributes property to a trust and gives each trust beneficiary (donee) a Crummey power. Crummey powers are used particularly in irrevocable trusts to hold property for the benefit of minor children.

In order for a Crummey power to convert a donor’s transfer into the gift of a present interest, the trustee of the recipient trust must timely notify each beneficiary of the existence and scope of his or her right to withdraw funds from the trust. If the appropriate records cannot be produced at the time of any gift or estate tax audit of the grantor, the gift tax exclusion may be denied to the grantor, thereby causing retroactive changes in the grantor’s tax liabilities and remaining applicable exclusion amount. Because of the common use of these withdrawal powers, the number of beneficiaries typically involved, and the differing terms of each such withdrawal power, the cost to taxpayers of complying with the Crummey rules is significant, as is the cost to IRS of enforcing the rules.

In addition, the IRS is concerned about the lack of a limit on the number of beneficiaries to whom Crummey powers are given. The IRS’s concern has been that Crummey powers could be given to multiple discretionary beneficiaries, most of whom would never receive a distribution from the trust, and thereby inappropriately exclude from gift tax a large total amount of contributions to the trust. (For example, a power could be given to each beneficiary of a discretionary trust for the grantor’s descendants and friendly accommodation parties in the hope that the accommodation parties will not exercise their Crummey powers.) The IRS has sought (unsuccessfully) to limit the number of available Crummey powers by requiring each powerholder to have some meaningful vested economic interest in the trust over which the power extends. See Estate of Cristofani v. Comm’r, 97 T.C. 74 (1991); Kohlsaat v. Comm’r, 73 TCM 2732 (1997).

Proposal

The proposal would eliminate the present interest requirement for gifts that qualify for the gift tax annual exclusion. Instead, the proposal would define a new category of transfers (without 188 regard to the existence of any withdrawal or put rights), and would impose an annual limit of $50,000 (indexed for inflation after 2017) per donor on the donor’s transfers of property within this new category that will qualify for the gift tax annual exclusion. This new $50,000 per-donor limit would not provide an exclusion in addition to the annual per-donee exclusion; rather, it would be a further limit on those amounts that otherwise would qualify for the annual per-donee exclusion. Thus, a donor’s transfers in the new category in a single year in excess of a total amount of $50,000 would be taxable, even if the total gifts to each individual donee did not exceed $14,000. The new category would include transfers in trust (other than to a trust described in section 2642(c)(2)), transfers of interests in passthrough entities, transfers of interests subject to a prohibition on sale, and other transfers of property that, without regard to withdrawal, put, or other such rights in the donee, cannot immediately be liquidated by the donee.

The proposal would be effective for gifts made after the year of enactment.

Last year’s Green Book Proposal on the same topic can be read here.