Among The Wealth Whisperers

An annual conference of advisers shows how the U.S. tax code works for the top 0.1%

- Pat Regnier

The elite tax attorneys were supposed to be at a sunny Orlando resort, swapping ideas for outsmarting the Internal Revenue Service. But the omicron surge had canceled January’s 56th annual meeting of the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, put on by the University of Miami Law School. So instead more than 1,000 advisers to America’s wealthiest families were stuck on Zoom, many up north in unusually cold late-March weather.

Just as the conference opened, Democrats were once again trying to get the superwealthy to pay what President Joe Biden frequently calls their “fair share.” The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s latest salvo was a 120-page packet of proposals that would raise $2.5 trillion in all. A levy dubbed the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax grabbed the headlines, but the estate lawyers soon looked past that and dived into the finer details of Biden’s plans. They didn’t like what they found.

“We’re going to be facing another season of worry with our clients,” Carlyn McCaffrey, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in New York, said on the first day of the conference on March 28, just as the Treasury Department’s “Greenbook” of revenue proposals was posted online. “I’m not much looking forward to that, but it’s a path we’ve been down before, and I guess we’re not done yet.”