An inheritance tax or estate tax is a levy paid by a person who inherits money or property or a tax on the estate (total value of the money and property) of a person who has died. In international tax law, there is a distinction between an estate tax and an inheritance tax: an estate tax is assessed on the assets of the deceased, while an inheritance tax is assessed on the legacies received by the beneficiaries of the estate. However, this distinction is not always respected in the language of tax laws. For example, the "inheritance tax" in the United Kingdom is a tax on the assets of the deceased, and is therefore, strictly speaking, an estate tax.
In some jurisdictions the term used is death duty. For historical reasons that term is used colloquially (though not legally) in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth nations.
Read more about Inheritance Tax: Varieties of Inheritance and Estate Taxes, Other Taxation Applied To Inheritance
Famous quotes containing the words inheritance and/or tax:
“Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 14:28,29.
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)