Tysons partner Ron Aucutt, co-chair of the firm’s Private Wealth Services Group, was quoted in a recent Bloomberg BNA article about a drop in the effective estate tax rate for returns filed in 2016.
The Oct. 11 story reported that Internal Revenue Service data for 2016 returns showed net estate tax payments of $18.3 billion by 5,219 estates with a gross value of $107.8 billion for an effective tax rate of about 17 percent. That’s 2 percentage points less than the effective 2015 estate tax rate, the story said.
A decline can result from several factors, Aucutt told Bloomberg BNA. Deductions such as the marital deduction can fluctuate from year to year, depending on whether a deceased spouse is the first or the second of a married couple to die.
Also, effective tax rates calculated using gross estimate values can be misleading because reducing the size of the gross estate is part of estate planning, the story noted.