Senate Finance Committee launches investigation, while anti-syndication bill is introduced in the House and Senate
Abusive syndicated easements are bad news, as described in more detail in my December 2017 article here. The Land Trust Alliance and the IRS have been fighting to shut down this tax shelter for years, and now Congress is jumping into the fray. On March 27, 2019, the Senate Finance Committee announced the beginning of an investigation into abusive syndicated conservation easement transactions. The Committee kicked off its investigation with fourteen individual letters to parties associated with investors known to have engaged in this type of syndicated easement.
Continue Reading Congress Increases Scrutiny of Syndicated Conservation Easements
Last session, California passed 
When the Tax Court issued its opinion in 
Governor Brown signed S.B. 901 into law on September 7. The controversial and lengthy bill is simply entitled “Wildfires,” but has garnered a lot of media attention for what many are calling a utility bailout for the Northern California fires. What hasn’t received much attention is a small paragraph slipped into the bill to amend California’s conservation easement enabling statute, California Civil Code Sections 815–816. 
This month, the Tax Court revived a method to defeat conservation deductions with its October 10 opinion published as 
The February 15, 2017 deadline for nonprofit organizations in California seeking to initially obtain or renew exemption from property taxes is quickly approaching, and there are changes to the reporting requirements if your organization allows third parties to use your property.
It seems that San Francisco may have just partially removed its exception from transfer tax that applied to gifts, but the Office of the Assessor-Recorder may not be aware. As a bit of background, transfer tax applies to transfers of interests in real property and, in some cases, to transfers of interests in legal entities that own real property. Transfer tax applies to transfers of interests in a legal entity when enough of the interests in the entity are transferred so as to result in a deemed “change of ownership” of the real property that it owns. 
A new private ruling may be of great interest to clients with substantial real estate interests who wish to contribute one or more properties to a family foundation. The ruling suggests that payment by the foundation to a property management entity controlled by the donor may be permissible under the personal services exception.
A Brief Case Study: Your nonprofit’s founder sends out an email in their official capacity to all of its members urging the them to vote for or against a political candidate or for or against a local proposition.
On August 15, 2016, the Tax Court decided in 
This month more than 2,500 people gathered at the ninth 
The Tax Court, in a case of first impression, has recently ventured into the perpetuity minefield. One Dr. Douglas Carroll and spouse Deirdre Smith, of Baltimore, Maryland, conveyed a conservation easement in 2005 over approximately 26 acres of open land in Maryland, mostly pastureland zoned for agricultural uses, to the Maryland Environmental Trust (MET) and the Land Preservation Trust (LPT). The former organization is a quasi-governmental agency, the latter a private, nongovernmental exempt organization. The protected property consisted of two parcels of unequal size; upon the smaller parcel sat the taxpayers’ two-story primary residence, and, on the larger, a small (1,000-square-foot) house where a farmhand tenant resided.
