Over the past several years the IRS has had several high profile victories in cases involving taxpayers’ use of family limited partnerships or LLCs as vehicles to achieve valuation discounts to reduce the tax upon transfers of wealth to their heirs. Many of these rulings have come out of “bad facts” cases where the taxpayer either did not respect the formalities of the entity or there was no real purpose to the entity except to achieve tax savings. However, in the recent case of the Estate of Mirowski v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, T.C. Memo 2008-74, the Tax Court issued a favorable ruling to the taxpayers and rejected many of the arguments the IRS.

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