Us vs. Museums

From: McFadden, Mike <mmcfadden_at_cmh.edu>
Date: Tue Mar 6 11:02:38 2001

The artificially inflated valuation of a donation to a museum is exactly how
many paintings ended up in museums. The IRS cracked down of paintings
created to be donations for tax fraud purposes. The same scheme has been
tried with, property, cars, clothing, furniture, horses, and boats. The
main issue is FMV, fair market value. You can't claim it's worth $100,000
if nobody will pay that. It's especially difficult without comparable sales
of the item to value your item.

There have been cases of dealers trading items among themselves to establish
an artificial market value. No money changed hands just paperwork.

Mike
mmcfadden_at_cmh.edu
Received on Tue Mar 06 2001 - 11:02:38 GMT