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The throwback tax is the US tax law’s main tool for discouraging tax-free accumulation of income by foreign non-grantor trusts for US beneficiaries. Its complex rules are a dangerous minefield that should be avoided. This article reviews the operation of the throwback tax rules, and assesses the effectiveness of this trust anti-deferral regime in various fact patterns. It also discusses how the trust anti-deferral regime interacts with the US law’s foreign corporation anti-deferral regime, another minefield.

The authors analyze the impact of the Tax Court's 2000 Walton v. Commissioner decision on fixed-term zeroed-out grantor retained annuity trusts. The use of such trusts as a means of allowing taxpayers to transfer property to family members without paying gift taxes is discussed.

Among the useful changes made by EGTRRA are an expansion of the automatic GST exemption allocation rule, a new rule permitting trusts to be severed, a direction for section 9100-type relief with respect to making or electing out of allocations, a new rule directing that a GST allocation is effective if there has been substantial compliance, a limited provision allowing for retroactive allocations, and a clarification of the valuation rules used to determine a trust's inclusion ratio.

Issues related to Treasury Dept regulations regarding federal estate taxes are examined, focusing on how the regulations relate to the 1997 US Supreme Court decision in Commissioner v. Estate of Hubert. Topics include how estate administration relates to marital and charitable deductions, and the rules that categorize administration expenses.

Under the approach taken by IRS in recent Proposed Regulations, it should be easier to avoid a loss of exempt status because of changes to a trust. While the new rules generally are favorable to taxpayers, they need expansion and clarification. In addition, pending legislative changes to the rules governing allocation of GST exemption may finally succeed in being enacted.

A charity organized as a trust rather than a corporation may minimize the effective tax rate on UBTI derived from an S corporation, if the charity is prepared to make substantial contributions to a public charity. Individual shareholders of S corporations considering a donation of stock to a charity should take into account several factors, including whether the donee is likely to hold or sell the stock. Likewise, charities seeking such donations may want to set up trusts to receive such stock.

Without notice to practitioners or taxpayers, when the Section 2702 Regulations were finalized in 1992 an example was changed, ostensibly to resolve an inconsistency. Instead, the new example is itself inconsistent with the rest of the Regulations, with the statute, and with centuries of common law and state property law interpretations. While a direct court challenge to the example is pending, a recent Tax Court decision compounds the problems by misinterpreting the application of the example.

The rights of unmarried cohabitants in the USA are determined by the courts of each state. Until the early 1970s, most states gave unmarried cohabitants virtually no rights in the property of their partners. Since then the law has developed rapidly and inconsistently from state to state. This article discusses the principal approaches used to confer rights on unmarried cohabitants. It also discusses the special tax challenges faced by unmarried cohabitants when they transfer properties to each other.

The article examines key provisions of the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization and Job Creation Act of 2010 that affect generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax in the U.S. It looks at GST tax planning opportunities that were available in 2010, and examines the ways in which Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Chapter 13 works in 2011 and 2012. It shows how to take advantage of the temporary low GST tax rate and temporary high GST tax exemption under the 2010 Tax Act.

A review of the article "Who Killed the Rule Against Perpetuities?," by Grayson M.P. McCouch, published in the journal "Pepperdine Law Review," is presented.

An abstract of the article "A Not-So-Crummey Way to Avoid Taxes: A Call for Congressional Action to Eliminate Abuse of the Present Interest Requirement," by Kristin L. Zook is presented.