waiving your rights to an inheritance. ..

W

whiskey1

Registered User
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Hope someone might be able to answer the following.

My father passed away leaving no will. He had owned land. My siblings and I waived our 1 third entitlements to his estate thus leaving all my late fathers estate to our mother.

By doing this have we 'gifted' her back money by which she now has to pay tax on this?

I would have thought you are not obliged to accept monies by inheritance.
 
Your father died intestate - he did not leave a will.

Under the rules of intestacy, all property devolves as to spouse two thirds and children one third.

You have "disclaimed" your inheritance. As a result, it passes to the person next entitled - your mother. There are no tax limits on inheritances inter spouse.

It might be different if you took the inheritance and then gifted it to your mother.

mf
 
mf1 said:
Your father died intestate - he did not leave a will.

Under the rules of intestacy, all property devolves as to spouse two thirds and children one third.

You have "disclaimed" your inheritance. As a result, it passes to the person next entitled - your mother. There are no tax limits on inheritances inter spouse.

It might be different if you took the inheritance and then gifted it to your mother.

mf
Click to expand...

Thank you mf1.

Thats what I was thinking. All the children wrote letters waiving our entitlement to our third share. Therefore we never received any monies to gift it back to our mother.
 
Spot on. I think the issue only arises where you disclaim an inheritance in favour of a named person.

You have not in this case so no issues. Surely you sought confirmation of this prior to disclaiming.
 
Me and my siblings received 'catital acquisitions tax' reminders from the revenue lately. When we queried why we received these we were told we had received inheritance in relation to our late fathers estate. This was very surprising to us as we had disclaimed our inheritance and thus have not at any time received monies from his estate.

I contacted the solicitor who handled the estate and probate on behalf of my siblings and myself to query the letters from the revenue. The explaination giving was that there was only 2 options at the time:

1: when we waived our entitlements we were esentially 'gifting' it to the next person entitled I.e. our mother and thus she would be paying gift tax on this. (Threshold it seems for this is very low).

2: take the entitlements as this was the best option for tax purposes because the inheritance amount involved was below the tax free threshold. (This I found strange as siblings have got sites etc so how near any of us was to the threshold was information the solicitor was not privy to).

We are puzzled by all this as we have written letters waiving our inheritance yet the revenue says we received it.

Would an affidavit from the solicitor to the revenue rectify this or not?
 
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