Journal Publications

A 10,000-path Monte Carlo simulation benchmarking charitable remainder unitrust outcomes against the three alternatives a client with a concentrated low-basis position would actually weigh: hold and draw from the position, hold to death for the IRC section 1014 basis step-up, or liquidate, pay the capital gains tax, and reinvest. Rather than testing the CRUT against a single benchmark, the study maps a systematic suitability parameter space — donor age, payout rate, cost basis, time horizon, and charitable intent — and reports the probability that the unitrust wins in each region of that space. The output is a suitability framework an adviser can apply to a specific client rather than a generic case for or against the structure.

An empirical study of the 4,241 California charitable remainder trusts reporting $50 million or more in assets, built from IRS Form 5227 micro-data for filing years 2016, 2017, and 2020–2022. Roughly 83 percent are charitable remainder unitrusts rather than annuity trusts, and the population clusters in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. The central finding is structural: about two-thirds of these trusts are administered by private individual trustees rather than banks or trust companies. The article works through what self-trusteeship demands at every asset level — IRC section 4941 self-dealing exposure for the grantor-trustee, the independent-trustee-or-qualified-appraisal requirement for unmarketable assets under Treasury Regulation section 1.664-1(a)(7), unbundled custody and section 664(b) four-tier administration, and successor trustee planning. It also documents a reversal in the IRS trust-type code documentation and other data-quality limits researchers should know about.

Practitioners take the IRS remainder factors on faith. This paper derives them. It translates I.R.C. section 7520 and Treasury Regulation section 1.664-4 into explicit formulas, so the charitable deduction for a charitable remainder unitrust can be computed from first principles rather than looked up — covering the section 7520 discount rate, the 2010CM mortality table, and the interpolation that produces the published remainder factors. Because the method is replicable, a practitioner can verify a vendor's number independently or build a proprietary valuation model. A companion CRUT calculator implements the approach.

The first comprehensive analysis of IRS Form 5227 microdata on charitable remainder trusts since the IRS's 2014 study of filing year 2012. Using seven years of publicly available microdata (2016–2022), the article examines CRT population trends, new trust formations, asset distributions, and trust longevity. Key findings: the CRT population declined approximately 10 percent — from 105,860 trusts in 2012 to 95,165 in 2022 — while new formations remained stable at roughly 2,462 per year, indicating that terminations are outpacing formations as trusts established in the 1990s mature. The article also documents significant methodological issues in the IRS data, including the inutility of the FR_1041_CD classification field, the absence of trust-type data for 2017, and pervasive quality problems in the ASSET_CD and ASSET_AMT fields that preclude reliable asset-size analysis.

An analysis of California Assembly Bill 1663 and its introduction of less-restrictive alternatives to conservatorship, including supported decision-making agreements. Examines the legislative background, procedural mechanics, and practical implications for estate planning practitioners.