The best tax strategy for an interfamily transfer largely depends on whether the owner has sufficient outside resources or if they are counting on the sale to fund their retirement or next venture.

In cases where the owner has sufficient resources, one option is to directly gift shares or interests in the business to family members. Gifting can trigger gift tax consequence but not income tax consequences, and the recipient assumes your cost basis in the transferred asset. Let’s look at a few scenarios to see how this could work out.

In the first example, assume that at the time of the owner’s retirement, the value of the company is $10 million. If you gift the company to family members at that time (assuming gift-splitting from a married couple), the $10 million value is assessed against your lifetime gift/estate tax unified credit), the current total unified credit in this situation is slightly less than $11 million. As a result, gifting in this scenario would not result in any tax owed and leave you with just under $1 million of unified credits to apply to other assets.

In a second scenario, assume the owner holds on to the company until death and then transfers it via their estate to family members. Also assume that the company has grown since it was worth $10 million and that at the owner’s death is now worth $40 million. In this scenario, there is now a substantial estate tax issue. So we can see that generally, if the value of a business is expected to increase substantially over time, it pays to transfer to subsequent generations sooner rather than later.

Next, let’s look at options under the opposite situation – where the owner needs to take out proceeds from the sale or transfer of the company to live on.

The first option here is that the owner could retain actual ownership and only transition management to the following generation. This allows the owner to keep an income stream from the business. The problem here is that eventually the family will end up in the same situation as discussed above, where waiting and passing the entity through the owner’s estate will result in substantial estate tax liabilities. So the question remains then, if the owner is dependent on the company for income, what can be done to avoid estate taxes upon transfer?

The second option is that the owner sells the company to the next generation. In this case assume the children do not have the cash to buy the business outright, so the owner issues a note to enable the purchase at the time that the business was worth $10 million. Here, issuing the promissory note would essentially freeze the transfer value at $10 million. The purchasing children would then pay deductible interest on the promissory note to the parents out of income from the acquired company. At the time of the issuer’s death, the children’s own promissory note would pass to back to themselves. The issue here is that upon the sale of the company, the parent would realize a capital gain and incur an income tax liability. Overall, it is likely (but not certain, dependent on the exact situation) that the capital gains tax on an early sale is likely to be far less than the estate tax incurred on a transfer at death after significant appreciation.

As you can see, there are many variables and options at play in transferring a company to the next generation, so it is best to plan ahead with the help of qualified professionals.

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