Just a short note on the budget and its consequences for us as probate practitioners:-

1. No change to tax rate or thresholds;

2. All other reliefs remain unchanged (eg agricultural relief, dwellinghouse relief, same event relief etc) (Subject however to the Finance Bill);

3. The residential development stamp duty refund scheme was due to expire on 31 December 2021 and has now been extended to 31 December 2022. You might recall that I dealt with this scheme in my email of the 26 June (It’s there for the asking). This is where you can recoup the majority of your 7.5% commercial stamp duty rate if you build a dwellinghouse on your site. You might recall that you had to build your house within 2 years of the commencement notice. This has now been extended to 2.5 years. See the other conditions set out in that email;

4. Consanguinity relief (that is where the stamp duty is reduced to 1% – see my email of 21 August – It’s a zero sum game) has been extended until 31 December 2023; and

5. The stamp duty rate of 1% related to consolidation of farms is extended to 31 December 2022 (not previously mentioned by me in any emails).

So pretty easy for us to manage.

There was a good bit of kite flying during the year about raising the threshold for inheritances by children so that Dublin houses would be exempt from CAT. On the other hand there was talk of reducing thresholds to bring in more income. None of this really came to pass. The overall annual intake from CAT into the system is relatively small (normally about €500 million). Tweaking CAT is unlikely to go much towards plugging our €21.5 billion deficit for 2020. Yes, that billion!