After 2021, whether an expenditure was deducted currently or recovered through depreciation often affected timing, but it typically did not create a meaningful advantage from a Section 163(j) perspective. The restoration of depreciation, amortization, and depletion addbacks in the computation of adjusted taxable income (“ATI”) has changed that analysis and created a new opportunity for taxpayers with actual or anticipated interest limitation exposure. As a result, taxpayers should reconsider whether certain expenditures that historically may have been deducted immediately can instead be capitalized into depreciable or amortizable property in order to improve their Section 163(j) profile.

The story of Anne Milner Fields is one of the reasons family limited partnership (FLP) opinions appeal to me so much. Born in 1925, she grew up in a small town in Texas and then moved to Dallas where she got a job as a secretary and met prominent oil man Bert Fields Sr. They married, and she lived the life of a socialite until he died in 1963. She consciously turned herself into a businesswoman, going so far as to take accounting courses. Having no children or grandchildren, she took her grandnephew, Bryan Milner, under her wing, paying for his education and mentoring him. In 2010, the year she turned 85, she made him executor of her estate and gave him a general power of attorney. He was also set to inherit the residue of her estate after some specific bequests. I really think we have the elements of a novel or a TV miniseries here, but we are tax people, so we are going to focus on how Anne’s estate tax was handled after she passed. It didn’t go well.