Accounting
Buy-sell agreements in focus for business owners
Business owner clients seeking to use the shrinking estate-tax window to pass down closely held shares may need to think through new or updated buy-sell agreements.
The potential expiration of many provisions
For business owners trying to remove some assets from their estates while ensuring an orderly succession in the event of death, disability, retirement, divorces or other challenges, the buy-sell agreements are “not a direct correlation” to the possible expiration but an important factor ahead of the sunset date, said Dawn Jinsky, a certified financial planner and certified public accountant who is the leader of estate and business transition planning with Southfield, Michigan-based registered investment advisory firm
Those discussions are also coming after a Supreme Court
“Many people are choosing to gift closely held stock because of the decreasing exemptions, and if you are doing that, you also need to look at a buy-sell agreement,” Jinsky said in an interview. “It’s become an ancillary discussion that has to happen.”
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With taxes that can “add up quickly” for larger estates and any number of scenarios that may leave the business in the hands of the wrong people in the eyes of one or more current owners, the agreements represent another area in which “failing to plan is planning to fail,” she added.
In general, the business owners must choose between three kinds of buy-sell agreements: an entity-purchase agreement setting up the business itself to buy a deceased partner’s stock; a cross-purchase deal that provides for the other holders to pick up the holdings; or a hybrid one that gives the business the first right of refusal, according to Jinsky. The Supreme Court decision in
“While the Court admitted that the dispute in the Connelly case is narrow, with its result ‘a consequence of how the Connelly brothers chose to structure their agreement,’ the decision may have far-reaching implications for closely held businesses,” Levenfeld Pearlstein attorneys Suzanne Shier and Robert Garner wrote in a
Describing those kinds of scenarios or posing the concern of what may happen if, say, one partner in the business goes through a divorce or one of the children of an owner dies, can help advisors and tax professionals convince clients to start the conversation about a buy-sell agreement.
Those documents enable the businesses to establish “all the parameters” for any unforeseen events, with the method for valuation looming as “one of the most critical of those decisions,” Jinsky said. So-called tagalong rights provide certainty that heirs will get “some kind of true fair-market value” for their holdings and avoid scrutiny by the IRS or any state authorities noticing a disparity between the sales price of a business and the size of their estate, she noted. The agreements spell out the process and formula for those valuations.
Otherwise, the owners may run into a situation in which “‘my business partner and her family owe a huge estate tax liability but didn’t get the corresponding proceeds,'” Jinsky said.
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Clients can work out any other issues that could come up through crafting the buy-sell agreement as well, she added.
“Death, disability and retirement are the three key ones that you establish, but then there are some other ones that can be put into the buy-sell agreement,” she said. “A buy-sell can be as complicated or simplified as the situation warrants. If you’ve seen one buy-sell, you’ve seen one buy-sell. It really varies based on who are the owners and what are they looking to accomplish.”
The Governmental Accounting Standards Board issued guidance today that will require separate disclosures for certain types of capital assets for the purposes of note disclosures.
GASB Statement No. 104,
The statement requires certain types of assets to be disclosed separately in the note disclosures about capital assets. The intent is to allow users to make better informed decisions and to evaluate accountability. The requirements are effective for fiscal years beginning after June 15, 2025, and all reporting periods thereafter, though earlier application is encouraged.
The guidance requires separate disclosures for four types of capital assets:
- Lease assets reported under Statement 87, by major class of underlying asset;
- Intangible right-to-use assets recognized by an operator under Statement 94, by major class of underlying asset;
- Subscription assets reported under Statement 96; and,
- Intangible assets other than those listed in items 1-3, by major class of asset.
Under the guidance, a capital asset is a capital asset held for sale if the government has decided to pursue the sale of the asset, and it is probable the sale will be finalized within a year of the financial statement date. A government should disclose the historical cost and accumulated depreciation of capital assets held for sale, by major class of asset.
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