Gerzog: A Simplified Verifiable Gift Tax

Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore), A Simplified Verifiable Gift Tax:

The purpose of this article is to create a simpler and more accountable federal gift tax. The proposed tax would simplify gift completion rules, adopt a hard-to-complete rule of transfer taxation, reduce the annual exclusion while expanding the consumption exclusion, and, by replicating the portability reporting rules, employ gift tax preference inducements to increase gift tax compliance. The proposed gift tax reaffirms basic principles of transfer taxes, encourages simple, outright gifts, and eliminates some of the major valuation abuses in the current gift tax regime.