Back in November we wrote up the Tax Court decision in Dickinson for the Jack Straw, focusing on the argument IRS was actually making, which was not made all that clear in the text of the opinion. Still mystified why IRS did not take an appeal.

Phil Purcell over at PG Today asked me to turn this into an article for that publication. Linked below are the text as submitted and as it appeared in print.

Also linked is the slide deck I used on a joint presentation with Kate Crary at Gadsden Schneider & Woodward for the charitable planning and orgs group of the RPTE section of the ABA.

That deck has since been expanded to include a discussion of the pending litigation in Fairbairn v. Fidelity Charitable. We will be using a version of that deck in a webinar I am co-presenting tomorrow and again on Thursday with Bryan Clontz at Charitable Solutions, LLC.

A couple of years ago I threw together a webinar for Lorman on planning for intergenerational transfer of a vacation home. This was an orphaned topic for them, created years earlier by someone who had moved on to other projects. But they wanted to repeat it, and somehow they found me.

And obviously it is not within my usual scope. My skillset, yes, but not my wheelhouse. Or whatever is the jargon.

But I did it, and learned a thing or two along the way about qualifying the transfer of a nonvoting interest in a family limited partnership for the gift tax annual exclusion.

And then more recently the folks at WealthCounsel picked up on it and asked me to flesh this out into an article for their quarterly. Which just came out today. Enjoy.

Today we are doing a soft launch of a series of asynchronous webinars under the collective title "PG 103: stuff every gift planner should kinda know."

The intended audience are in house development folks, mostly nonlawyers, who have at least some occasion to talk with existing or prospective donors about various "planned" giving vehicles -- gift annuities, remainder trusts, etc.

But the material is pitched at a sufficiently advanced level, with citation to key rulings, court decisions, and sections of the tax Code and regulations, that lawyers should also find it useful. At this point we have not yet sought advance certification for continuing education credits.

The webinars attempt to situate the discussion of each of these vehicles within its tax policy context, so that the gift planner will have somewhat more than a basic understanding not only of the technical requirements -- what you might call "tax compliance" -- but also what are the policy objectives these requirements seek to accomplish. And what might the basic rules imply as the planner encounters novel situations

In my own experience (here reverting to the first person singular), a somewhat complex set of data points is much easier to remember if it is embedded in a narrative. Some version of this narrative is what we (again the editorial "we") intend to provide.

What makes this a "soft" launch is that we are putting the webinars up one at a time, somewhat out of sequence. Today's posting is a webinar titled "the gift annuity in context," which would actually be the second or third item in the completed sequence.

Alongside that webinar, we are also posting a freestanding item, not part of the PG 103 sequence, titled "charitable gifting incentives in the CARES Act," which we are offering for now on a "pay what you will" basis, in five dollar increments, from zero. From time to time we expect to post other items of this nature, i.e., special topics or recent developments.

[I sent the following a few weeks ago to the subscribers to the Jack Straw Fortnightly. Work on the text and slide decks for the PG 103 project proceeds apace, but I am still puzzling over the logistics of posting and paywalls. Now thinking more likely Dropbox than Patreon, so as not to require folks to commit to an ongoing subscription.]

Friends,

The Jack Straw has always been casual in its adherence to a fortnightly schedule, but it is possible we will be even more sporadic in coming weeks.

I am turning my attention for the moment to the launch of a project I am calling "PG 103," which will be a series of webinars based on a 25k word text I wrote a couple of years back and have been updating since, covering pretty much the entire waterfront on the tax considerations that arise in charitable gift planning -- contribution limits, carryforwards, bargain sales, gift annuities, split-interest trusts, private foundation excise tax rules, etc.

The subtitle to the source text is "stuff every charitable gift planner should kinda know." The idea is to situate the various gift planning vehicles in their tax policy contexts, so that the planner can readily understand what are the rules and why those are the rules, and how to tweak these vehicles to meet the particular needs of the prospective donor and the recipient charity.

I am still working out the logistics, but probably these webinars will be hosted on Vimeo with a modest paywall through Patreon. There are about eight hours of content here, from which I could make seven or eight segments of an hour each, which could be made to qualify for continuing education credit. Probably a fair amount of research and maybe pre-certification to do here.

And/or I could break it down into smaller topics of about a quarter hour per, but presumably these would not qualify for continuing education credit. Along the way I might also produce some shorter pieces on recent developments, and some of these will not be paywalled.

I am a novice when it comes to this technology. Anyone who has some experience with putting up webinar series behind paywalls please feel free to offer suggestions, thanks.

The underlying text itself would probably make a good shelf reference. I will be looking at mechanisms for publishing this in book form. Again, anyone who has some experience in self-publishing please feel free to offer suggestions.

And again thanks to all of you for your support of the Jack Straw -- which, not to worry, will continue into the indefinite future, and will likely remain free of charge.

Russ Willis

The Greystocke Project is submitting comments on the proposed regs that would clarify, at long last, that excess deductions on termination on an estate or trust are not per se miscellaneous itemized deductions in the hands of the distributees.

With the 7520 rate at a record low zero point eight pct. and the equity markets still not fully recovered from the recent crash, I was reminded of this piece I wrote back in 2009 for submission to the business journal in Portland. Probably time to dust it off and update the numbers. But I do like the anachronistic references to the 3.5 million transfer tax exemption and to 7520 rates in the six pct. range. Those were the days.

The Greystocke Project is submitting comments on the proposed regs to relieve exempt orgs other than (c)(3)s, 527s, and nonexempt trusts from the requirement to disclose their substantial contributors.