Inheritance Tax — A comparative analysis

Ann Mumford (Senior Lecturer in Tax, Queen Mary School of Law) has recently posted on SSRN her article entitled From Dahomey, to London, to DC: ‘Marketing’ Wealth with the Proposal for a Comprehensive Inheritance Tax.

Here is a summary of her article:

This paper was presented at the September 19, 2008 NYU Tax Law Review Symposium addressing Prof. Lily Batchelder’s proposal to implement a comprehensive inheritance tax. This draft essay seeks to demonstrate that the comprehensive inheritance tax proposal involves a just tax. The idea of justice in taxation frequently involves linking benefits to taxation, and is explored in different ways in tax legal scholarship. On the question of inheritance taxation, however, justice is frequently determined within a socio-political mire of competing objectives. Given the political capital involved, it can be difficult to construct arguments effectively, especially if one is arguing for the adaptation of a different form of taxation of inherited wealth.

This paper acknowledges that the comprehensive inheritance tax will face the problem of politics, as the issue of inheritance taxation is intensely political, and its unpopularity has been the subject of valuable academic analysis. Its spectre of repeal in the US has had an enormous impact in the UK, and elsewhere. Thus this draft response to the proposal for a comprehensive inheritance tax has started from a point of acknowledgment of comparative impact.