ESTATE TAX AMNESTY ROUND 3

Congress may have passed a bill to revive and extend the Estate Tax Amnesty until 2028—but don’t expect a full surge in estate settlements just yet.

Two years ago, we invited Atty. Jojo Mejia to speak on Estate Settlement Taxation and Planning in the Light of TRAIN Law. His talk focused less on theory and more on the uncomfortable truth: the real bottleneck isn’t the tax. It’s the people.

In practice, estates remain unsettled not because heirs refuse to pay, but because families can’t locate all the signatories. Some heirs are abroad. Some are estranged. Some simply vanish. And when paperwork can’t move forward, people start doing the unthinkable—forging signatures just to complete a sale or transfer.

The government also needs to step in and protect buyers trapped in this legal limbo. One possible approach: a law stating that if an heir—previously absent, unreachable, or uncooperative—suddenly resurfaces years later and tries to rescind a sale, the buyer should be treated as a buyer in good faith and shielded from litigation. The heir’s only recourse should be against the relatives who actually benefited from the sale. Another option is to require identified heirs to set aside a portion of the sale proceeds in a trust for a defined period—similar to an heir’s bond—which could serve as protection in case an overlooked heir later appears. I’m not sure what the exact legal mechanism would look like—I’m simply proposing ideas—but some form of buyer protection is long overdue.

Unless the government addresses this structural problem—missing heirs, fragmented families, and zero safeguards for buyers—the extended amnesty will once again fall short of its potential.