Benefits of estate planning to the CPA and his client;

              THE
BENEFITS
OP ESTATE
PLANING
EPA
AND HIS
EfflT
by David J. Vander Broek
It is often necessary that
members of professional firms
take time out from their busy
schedules to contemplate and
review the actual operation of
a particular segment of their
professional practice... for all
too often action which is nec­essary
is not taken.
It might be revealing if we
CPAs were to stop for a mo­ment
and critically review an
important but sadly neglected
segment of our practice: that
of pre-death estate planning.
The tendency is to ignore our
clients' very pressing needs in
this area. In the process, of
course, our own professional
practices suffer along with our
clients' best interests.
DEATH AND TAXES
The argument for pre-death
estate planning is overwhelm­ing.
A client can spend the
major portion of his lifetime
striving to build his personal
fortune. Question him, though,
on the time and effort spent on
planning an orderly and desir­able
distribution of assets af­ter
his death and silence may
be your answer.
CPAs provide a multitude of
valuable services to clients in
the audit, tax, and manage­ment
services areas. In most
instances these could be classi­fied
as service covering their
current or annual operational
needs.
If our services to individual
clients, in particular our tax
services, stop with this annual
type of current service and
ignore the area of pre-death
estate planning, we really have
not provided them with the
complete service they have a
right to expect.
I need not labor the fact that
death, along with taxes, is a
certainty for us all. When a
client dies, an estate is created.
The representatives of the es­tate
must then settle the cli­ent's
final accounting with the
Government. This estate may
be large or small, taxable or
nontaxable, planned or un­planned,
but exist it does and
it must be accounted for be­fore
the final transfer of the
decedent's assets to the heirs.
TYPES OF ESTATE
PLANNING
Estate planning can be di­vided
into two basic catego­ries:
pre-death planning and
post-death planning.
With proper pre-death plan­ning,
post-death planning often
can be limited to those statu­tory
options and procedures
available to the Executor or
Administrator of the estate.
Thus, in this article, we are
primarily concerned with the
pre-death aspects of estate
planning. The objective, of
course, is to arrange the cli­ent's
estate so that his dispos­itive
wishes will be most ef­fectively
realized on the one
hand, and the post-death prob­lems
for his Executor and
heirs minimized on the other.
In view of our heavy respon­sibility
to both the client and
his heirs, we will attempt to
spell out some of the pre-death
measures the CPA can take to
fulfill his obligations in this
vitally important area of ac­counting.
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