PRESERVE YOUR INHERITANCE
Hands off our heritage!
If you are fortunate enough to have works of art or other heritage items of national importance, you can sidestep inheritance tax on these using the ‘conditionally exempt transfers’ rules.
All in all, this must be an interesting process. First of all, the Revenue’s art expert (that must be a fun job!) has to express a view on whether your early Picasso, which you found in granddad’s attic, is a work of importance to the national heritage.
If he does so, you can then apply to exempt the value of this artwork (which, of course, can be very considerable indeed) from inheritance tax – on one condition.
The condition is that you make the artwork available to be looked at by the public on a “reasonable” basis.
One has heard tell of artworks jealously guarded after this exemption has been claimed to the extent that nobody actually gets a chance to look at them. The Revenue has clamped down a bit on this, we understand, and you do have to accede to reasonable requests from outsiders.
What you don’t have to do, however, is turn your home, effectively, into a museum that’s open to the public. Fulfilling the requirements of conditional exemption can be much less painful than some people may fear, and this is particularly the case, it has to be said, if the artwork concerned is not a particularly interesting one as far as the public are concerned, its interest perhaps being confined, in reality, to “a parcel of prigs and professors”!