Estate Tax Repeal Would Be a Bonanza for Trump and His Cabinet

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5. How Wal-Marts Waltons Maintain Their Billionaire Fortune: Taxes

Alice Walton’s mother and brother poured more than $9 billion into trusts since 2003 that fund charitable projects like Crystal Bridges and are also designed to protect gifts to heirs from taxation. Another Walton pioneered a tax-avoidance maneuver that is now widely used by U.S. billionaires.

“I hate to say it, but the very rich pay very little in gift and estate tax,” said Jerome Hesch, a lawyer at Berger Singerman LLP in Miami who reviewed some of the Walton family’s trust filings for Bloomberg. “At the Waltons’ numbers, the savings are unbelievable.”

At the end of the 1990s, an effort to repeal the estate tax gathered force, supported by a group of billionaire families and their lobbyists at Patton Boggs LLP, a Washington law firm. Walton Enterprises paid Patton Boggs to lobby on tax matters during that time.

A Patton Boggs lawyer, Aubrey Rothrock, said in a statement that the Waltons’ lobbying supported “private foundation reforms to create new incentives for charitable giving” and did not involve “the specific issue of repealing the estate tax.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-12/how-wal-mart-s-waltons-maintain-their-billionaire-fortune-taxes