Biden’s bid to tax inherited assets could be a documentation nightmare for wealthy heirs

The wealthy may have a whole other reason to dread President Joe Biden’s proposal to overhaul taxes on inheritances: They may have to dig through decades worth of documents to figure out what they owe Uncle Sam.

To help fund his American Families Plan, Biden is proposing higher taxes on capital gains and income for the wealthiest families.

He is also calling for the elimination of a decades-old loophole that allows individuals to inherit appreciated assets at market value with no taxes on the unrealized gain. This tactic is known as the “step-up in basis at death.”

Biden proposes ending this “basis step-up” for gains in excess of $1 million for single taxpayers – $2.5 million for couples – and ensuring that gains are taxed if the property isn’t donated to charity.

Coupled with a bid to raise long-term capital gains rates to 39.6% from 20% for households making over $1 million, wealthy heirs could be in for a pile of taxes.

But determining Uncle Sam’s cut could be difficult for certain assets. That’s because the basis – or the owner’s original investment in the asset – could be hard to track.

“How do you estimate the basis, especially when the person who had the best chance to answer that is deceased?” asked Ed Zollars, CPA and partner at Thomas, Zollars & Lynch in Phoenix.

Basis is important because the amount that you’ll pay in taxes when you sell an asset is based on the difference between the purchase price and the market value.

Without the “step-up in basis at death,” heirs would receive the asset with the decedent’s basis. This also means the heir could face a big tax bill on gains that have accumulated over decades.

Real estate is another complication. Owners can defer capital gains on real estate by swapping one investment property for another in what’s known as a 1031 exchange.

Investors who perform these exchanges over many years and fail to keep proper records risk losing track of their basis over time, which can lead to complexity when they sell the property and try to determine the capital gains tax bill.

Zollars once had a client who sold property that was purchased in the 1970s and had gone through multiple 1031 exchanges. “They kept no real records,” he said. “That’s the manual research, going to the county assessor’s office to find some record of sales and purchases, which at best would be indirect.”

Even tracking basis for long-held publicly traded assets can get complicated.

Custodians, mutual funds and brokerages were only required to comply with federal basis tracking rules starting in 2011. Investors with holdings prior to that period can run into problems chasing basis if they switched brokerage firms or if they were in dividend reinvestment plans.

“Where it gets complicated is when you’re reinvesting all the time,” Pimco advisor education senior consultant Tim Steffen said. “Sometimes people forget they’re doing that. They forget they get all that extra basis and finding the records to report it can be a challenge.”