Inheritance Tax

A client was faced with a common dilemma; his elderly mother had died and left a modest estate together with a property in north London. The value returned for IHT purposes was some £350,000 based on the ’free’ marketing opinion of a local estate agent who said the property was worth between £325,000 and £375,000. The VOA insisted that the property was worth at least £475,000, which meant the payment of an additional £50,000 in tax. This meant that the property would have to be sold rather than retained by the beneficiary as a long term investment.

We successfully negotiated a value of £360,000, saving the client some £46,000 in IHT; if a proper valuation report had been commissioned prior to the matter going into dispute the costs of that valuation would have been a cost that could have been off-set against tax. Good advice is not free but it often pays for itself in terms of the tax savings achieved.

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