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发帖数: 16971 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 Stock 讨论区 】
发信人: lovefreedom (橘子爱自由), 信区: Stock
标 题: 美国富人不用付遗产税
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Tue Dec 17 18:37:41 2013, 美东)
http://money.msn.com/business-news/article.aspx?feed=BLOOM&date
Federal law requires billionaires such as Adelson who want to leave fortunes
to their children to pay estate or gift taxes of 40 percent on those assets
. Adelson has blunted that bite by exploiting a loophole that Congress
unintentionally created and that the Internal Revenue Service unsuccessfully
challenged.
By shuffling his company stock in and out of more than 30 trusts, he’s
given at least $7.9 billion to his heirs while legally avoiding about $2.8
billion in U.S. gift taxes since 2010, according to calculations based on
data in Adelson’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
Hundreds of executives have used the technique, SEC filings show. These tax
shelters may have cost the federal government more than $100 billion since
2000, says Richard Covey, the lawyer who pioneered the maneuver. That’s
equivalent to about one-third of all estate and gift taxes the U.S. has
collected since then.
The popularity of the shelter, known as the Walton grantor retained annuity
trust, or GRAT, shows how easy it is for the wealthy to bypass estate and
gift taxes.
Covey’s technique is one of a handful of common devices that together make
the estate tax system essentially voluntary, rendering it ineffective as a
brake on soaring economic inequality, says Edward McCaffery, a professor at
the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law.
Since 2009, President Barack Obama and some Democratic lawmakers have made
fruitless proposals to narrow the GRAT loophole. Any discussion of tax
shelters has been drowned out by the debate over whether to have an estate
tax at all, McCaffery says.
In all, Adelson and his wife, Miriam, have created at least 25 GRATs. At
least 14 of the 25 trusts were zeroed out, according to the calculations
based on SEC filings. Those trusts transferred at least $7.9 billion to
family members, an amount that would otherwise have incurred gift taxes of $
2.8 billion.
The GRAT loophole is unlikely to be plugged anytime soon. President Obama
has included a proposal to limit the GRAT technique in each of his annual
budget plans but hasn’t pressed Congress to act on it, says Kenneth Kies, a
Republican tax lobbyist.
No one knows for sure how much all of these GRATs cost the U.S. government.
The IRS estimates the number of gift-tax returns filed in connection with
new GRATs each year; there were about 1,946 in 2009, according to the most
recent publicly available data. | o**********s
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