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The Corporate Transparency Act of 2020 (CTA), passed on January 1, 2021, is designed to prevent malign actors, i.e., companies that seek to conceal their ownership of businesses in the United States in an effort to facilitate illicit activity such as money laundering, financing of terrorism, tax fraud, and other acts of foreign corruption, from harming the national security interests of the United States and its allies. But why should this be of any interest to estate planners?

It may seem surprising to use a wine analogy to explain a legal concept, but when discussing trust decanting, pouring wine is often a part of the conversation. When you take a bottle of wine and slowly pour the wine from the bottle into a different container, you are separating the wine from any sediments that may have formed in the bottle. This process is called wine decanting. Decanting ultimately makes the wine taste better as it removes the harsh taste of built-up sediment. Similarly, trust decanting allows a trustee to modify an irrevocable trust by “pouring” the trust assets into a new trust that has different, often more favorable terms. If a trustee has the discretionary power to distribute trust assets to and for the benefit of a beneficiary, decanting enables a trustee to use this power to dictate the terms of a new trust.