Portability of the Estate Tax Exemption in the Taxpayer Certainty and Relief Act of 2009
The introduction of the article is below:
For more than twenty years, members of the ABA have been trumpeting the estate planning simplification for modestly wealthy taxpayers that would result from portability of the estate tax exemption. Formally recommended by the ABA Tax Section’s Task Force on Transfer Tax Restructuring in 1988 (41 Tax Law. 395), making the estate tax exemption portable would enable a decedent’s surviving spouse to take advantage of any remaining estate tax exemption not utilized by the decedent. While the Taxpayer Certainty and Relief Act of 2009 (S. 722, “TCRA”) has not yet emerged from the Senate Committee on Finance, it provides the clues as to what the final portability provisions might look like.