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benefit an annuity of Three Hundred Thousand ($300,000.00)
Dollars per year from my date of death during his life”. We held
that the bequest was “properly characterized as a lifetime
annuity under section 20.2031-7(a)(2), Estate Tax Regs.”, and
properly valued by the tables prescribed thereunder. Id.
Given such cases, we are satisfied that the definition of
annuity for purposes of section 7520 is broader than the estate
suggests. Estate of Cullison v. Commissioner, supra, involved
neither a payment stream derived from an invested corpus nor the
liquidation of an asset. The payments in Dix v. Commissioner,
supra, were equally independent of any underlying corpus. The
bequest in Estate of Shapiro v. Commissioner, supra, bears little
resemblance to the contractual relationship described by the
estate--purchase premiums, benefit options, beneficiary
elections, etc., played no role in the annuity’s genesis or
operation.
Moreover, the authorities discussed above also make clear
that a private annuity may be nothing more or less than an
unsecured debt obligation. Consequently, the estate’s repeated
labeling of the LOTTO prize as such in no way disqualifies it
from annuity status. That said, we turn to those assets that the
parties have agreed are in fact not considered annuities for
valuation purposes.
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