Don’t get too excited.
The Tax Technical Corrections Act of 2007, signed into law by President Bush on Dec. 29, corrects (in Section 3) what was probably an unintended and absurd estate-tax burden for heirs of charitable fractional-gift donors, which was caused by sloppy drafting of the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
The new law doesn’t address the PPA’s two other charity-chilling changes in the fractional-gifts rules, both of urgent concern to museums—the inability to take fair-market-value deductions based on the appreciated value of the gifts at the time of each fractional donation, and the new 10-year rule for completion of such gifts.
These problems would be solved in the Promotion of Artistic Giving Act, H.R. 3881, introduced Oct. 17 and still pending in the House Ways and Means Committee.
As usual, the Art Law Blog is the go-to authority for untangling these complexities.