New Clawback Proposed Regulations – What You Need to Know
On April 27, 2022, the IRS released proposed regulations that follow up on the initial “Anti-Clawback” regulations released in 2019. The proposed regulations provide guidance on how various estate planning strategies may be treated in situations where the unified estate and gift tax exemption is lower on the taxpayer’s date of death than it was on the date the strategy was implemented. Since lifetime gifts are factored into the estate tax calculation, planners were rightly concerned that a lifetime gift might not have the desired tax effect if the client died when the exemption was lower, bringing the large gift back into the estate but with a lower date-of-death exemption used for calculation purposes. The 2019 regulations ensured that lifetime gifts would not be “clawed back” into the estate by stating that the exemption used for estate tax calculation purposes is the higher of the date-of-death exemption and the exemption available at the time of the lifetime gifts. However, those regulations did not cover all situations, such as GRATs and other strategies where property was given away during lifetime but a portion (or all) of it could still be included in the client’s estate at death.