Who Treats A Non-Recourse Loan As A Full Recourse Loan? Your Uncle Might.

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We very much doubt that the Internal Revenue Service took note of our the blog posting that follows, but on April 15, 2016, two weeks after we wrote about the significant change to the tax treatment of non-recourse carve-outs, it published a “backtracking,” some might call it a reversal, of its earlier position. You can see how it essentially reversed its earlier position by clicking: HERE.

So, the text that begins in the paragraph below the shaded one is mostly of historical significance, hopefully only an aberration. Nonetheless, we leave it posted not only to preserve history, but also for how it explains the effect of “recourse debt,” an arcane topic.

Here is the latest position of the Internal Revenue Service, as of March 31, 2016:

If a partner’s guarantee of a partnership’s nonrecourse obligation is conditioned on the occurrence of certain “nonrecourse carve-out” events described below, the guarantee will not cause the obligation to fail to qualify as a nonrecourse liability of the partnership … until such time as one of those events actually occurs and causes the guarantor to become personally liable for the partnership debt under local law.

If a partner’s guarantee of a partnership’s nonrecourse obligation is conditioned on the occurrence of certain “nonrecourse carve-out” events described below, the guarantee will not cause the obligation to fail to qualify as qualified nonrecourse financing … until such time as one of those events actually occurs and causes the guarantor to become personally liable for the partnership debt under local law.

Today’s blog posting was written with more than a little trepidation. Before we reveal its topic, Ruminations needs to emphasize two of our recurrent themes. The first is that the prime skill in counseling clients or bosses is not to know the answer, but to figure out the question – to identify possible issues, problems or opportunities. With the question in hand, most answers are easily found. Without knowing the question, the answer is useless even if in your own head.

The second highlighted theme is that you don’t need to know all of the answers or even all of the questions if you have an expert source available to you. We’ve touted the need to have a “Rolodex” (for those more recently arrived on Earth, that’s a trademark for a conveniently arranged set of cards holding names and contact information for easy retrieval). Your Rolodex should have contacts for construction issues, utility issues, insurance issues, and whatever other experts you can gather in your data base. After wading through the labyrinth of today’s technical and boring posting, you’ll want to find one or more tax experts to add to your Rolodex, probably a tax-focused accountant and even a (business) tax attorney. Today, our sole mission is to sensitize readers to a narrow tax issue brought to mind by an October 15, 2015 Tax Memorandum from your friend and ours, the Internal Revenue Service. Yes, there will be a useful, but (probably) esoteric, “fact” revealed someplace near the end of today’s posting. But, that is only to scare readers into yielding up their egos and get better connected with experts. [Read more…]

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