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based on the carryover they claimed from 1985 under section
170(d)(1)(A).
This is another case in which this Court has been called
upon to value transferred property on the basis of appraisals by
well-qualified experts who arrive at fundamentally incompatible
valuations. The valuations offered by the parties' experts at
trial vary by a factor of 26 ($149,451 for petitioners versus
$5,733.49 for respondent).6 The experts' appraisals hardly
narrowed the gap between petitioner’s initial valuation of the
donation and respondent's initial determination of the value in
the notice of deficiency: the former was 90 times larger than
the latter. The parties have failed to settle this matter
through negotiation, thus calling upon the Court to use its
judgment in an area in which it has no preexisting expertise,
with opposing experts’ valuations that provide little more than
remote reference points as guidance.
Section 170(a) provides a deduction for any charitable
contribution made within the taxable year. Section 1.170A-
1(c)(1), Income Tax Regs., provides that if “a charitable
contribution is made in property other than money, the amount of
the contribution is the fair market value of the property at the
time of the contribution”. Fair market value is the price at
6 Examples of the extreme differences between the experts'
valuations of individual items in the collection abound. See
Table 2.
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