Baseball pitchers aren’t the only ones throwing curveballs. Leave it to the IRS to toss a beaut, and as Jeff Reeves writes for USA Today, “an unexpected ruling on tax law regarding IRA rollovers may have just created a headache for a small group of successful savers.”
“But thankfully,” his column continues, “experts agree that most Americans won’t be affected.” Other excerpts from the piece::
“The kerfuffle involves a recent decision by the United States Tax Court that states a taxpayer can perform only one tax-free “rollover” of an individual retirement account each year — regardless of how many IRAs they may have.
“This differs greatly from the widespread perception that a taxpayer can roll over as many IRAs as they want, and that the one-year cooling-off period applied to each individual fund.
“Daniel Morris, a senior partner at accounting firm Morris and D’Angelo in San Jose, says the sad reality is that most Americans don’t have a bunch of IRA accounts sitting around.
“’There may be some high net-worth individuals who are worried, but this doesn’t impact the typical person at all’, Morris said.
In sum there are aspects of this new ruling—described in some press accounts as a stunner, and in others as something far less—that’s definitely worth discussing with your financial advisor.