A federal district court judge has given the Internal Revenue Service permission to serve a “John Doe” summons on the California State Board of Equalization demanding the names of residents who transferred property to their children or grandchildren for little or no money, from 2005 to 2010. The IRS wants those names as part of a crackdown on what it believes is the widespread failure to file required tax returns when real property is passed between family members.
The IRS has already received information about intra-family property transfers from county or state officials in Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington state and Wisconsin. But officials of California’s BOE said state law prohibited them from disclosing the information without a court approved summons.
In an affidavit filed in the California case in October, Josephine Bonaffini, the Federal/State Coordinator for the IRS’ Estate and Gift Tax Program, said the agency has so far examined 658 taxpayers identified as transferring property to relatives and concluded that 238 of them should have, but didn’t, file Form 709, United States Gift (and Generation-Skipping Transfer) Tax Return. Twenty of those delinquent filers have already been assessed extra tax because they had exceeded the amount each person is allowed to transfer gift tax free, she said. Through 2010, that lifetime gift tax exemption was just $1 million. For 2011 and 2012, it has been raised to $5 million. Anyone can give anyone else property or cash worth up to $13,000 a year without that gift counting against the lifetime exemption, but gifts above that $13,000 “annual exclusion” amount must be reported on a Form 709 so the IRS can keep track of how much of his or her lifetime exemption each taxpayer has used up.
The counties collect the information and send it to the BOE so that the state agency can administer California’s Proposition 13, an initiative passed by voters in 1978 which limits annual property assessment increases to 2% or less unless a property is sold. Two later initiatives, Propositions 58 and 193, permit property transferred to children and, in certain circumstances, grandchildren, to retain the 2% cap but only if the requisite information is sent to the board where it is entered into a database.
With a normal summons, the IRS seeks information about a specific taxpayer whose identity it knows. A John Doe summons, by contrast, allows the IRS to get the names of all taxpayers who are members of a certain group it has reason to suspect might have broken the law. The IRS, for example, has used John Doe summons to seek lists of American taxpayers who have used aggressive tax shelters and of those who have unreported offshore accounts at Swiss Bank UBS and at HSBC's bank in India.