A new policy paper out today from the National Taxpayers Union analyzes how the Internal Revenue Service has waged a war on environmental conservation easements, taking taxpayers to court and instituting onerous filing requirements on conservation easements. This is harmful for both taxpayers and the environment: conservation easements are time-honored way for private conservation and stewardship of environmentally-threatened lands.
In recent years, the IRS has taken unprecedented actions to make it difficult for taxpayers to claim conservation easements, and their obstructionism is not warranted. Conservation easements have been beneficial to taxpayers and to environmental preservation, and the IRS’s attacks are clearly contradictory to the bipartisan support for conservation easement tax deductions.
In the paper Shortsighted: How the IRS’s Campaign Against Conservation Easement Deductions Threatens Taxpayers and the Environment, author Pete Sepp writes,
By imposing new opportunity costs on Americans participating in conservation partnerships the IRS has undermined the benefits to taxpayers across the country of allowing private citizens instead of the government to exercise stewardship over our precious lands.
Favoring conservation easement creation in the tax code has been an incredibly successful policy, and has seen conservation easements increase eight-fold in the last thirty years, but those successes have been under threat from the IRS. “By imposing new opportunity costs,” Sepp writes, “the IRS has undermined the benefits to taxpayers across the country of allowing private citizens instead of the government to exercise stewardship over our precious lands.”
For more information on the new National Taxpayers Union policy paper Shortsighted: How the IRS’s Campaign Against Conservation Easement Deductions Threatens Taxpayers and the Environment, please visit ntu.org/shortsighted or contact Kevin Glass, NTU Vice President of Communications, at 703-299-8670 or kglass@ntu.org.