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Opinion of Kennedy, J.
a material limitation on the right to receive income that would have a significant effect on the date-of-death value of the property of the estate." 101 T. C., at 324-325.
There is no indication in the case before us that the executor's power to charge administration expenses to income is equivalent to an express postponement of the spouse's right to income beyond a reasonable period of administration. Cf. 26 CFR § 20.2056(b)-5(f)(9) (1996) (requiring valuation of express postponements of the spouse's right to income beyond a reasonable period of administration). By contrast, we have no difficulty conceiving of situations where a provision requiring or allowing administration expenses to be paid from income could be deemed a "material limitation" on the spouse's right to income. Suppose the decedent's other bequests account for most of the estate's property or that most of its assets are nonincome producing, so that the corpus of the surviving spouse's bequest, and the income she could expect to receive from it, would be quite small. In these circumstances, the amount of the estate's anticipated administration expenses chargeable to income may be material as compared with the anticipated income used to determine the assets' date-of-death value. If so, a provision requiring or allowing administration expenses to be charged to income would be a material limitation on the spouse's right to income, reducing the marital bequest's date-of-death value and the allowable marital deduction.
Whether a limitation is "material" will also depend in part on the nature of the spouse's interest in the assets generating income. This analysis finds strong support in the text of § 20.2056(b)-4(a). The regulation gives an example of where a limitation on the right to income "may" be material—bequests "in trust" for the benefit of a decedent's spouse. The example suggests a significant difference between a bequest of income and an outright gift of the fee interest in the income-producing property. A fee in the
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