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2022 has been an eventful year with spiking inflation, rising interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and unnerving market volatility. Yet amidst these uncontrollable events and uncertainty going into 2023, there are still some valuable tax planning considerations and opportunities within your control.

Non-U.S. families establishing succession planning structures rarely think about the U.S. generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax. Nevertheless, when a foreign trust becomes a U.S. domestic trust so that distributions can be made in a tax-efficient manner to the settlor’s U.S. grandchildren and more remote descendants, U.S. trustees or tax return preparers may raise questions about whether those distributions are subject to the GST tax. Advisers to these families should become familiar with the application of the GST tax rules in order to bring clarity to the situation.

A non-U.S. company's classification for U.S. tax purposes is important for Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) compliance and U.S. withholding tax reasons. Advisors to families with succession planning structures that include holding, operating, and other companies should determine the U.S. tax classification for each company in the structure and resulting compliance and tax implications.

Continuing a trend of the past five years, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) grew in assets under management in 2020. However, the fact remains that the ETF continues to be a one-size-fits-all solution that isn’t optimal for everyone. The flexibility of a custom passive separately managed account (SMA) can beat an ETF in terms of tax efficiency in many cases. Three advantages of the SMA illustrate the benefits.

The ownership and governance structure of a private family trust company (“PFTC”) is highly customizable. This is important because all families are different, with different goals, family dynamics, asset composition, family sizes, and family affiliates. With that in mind, there are some key considerations in structuring the entity ownership and governance of a PFTC, both tax-related and not tax-related.