Saving America’s Family Enterprises (SAFE) is a bipartisan research and education organization focused on comprehensive tax reforms that raise revenue, increase fairness, promote greater efficiency, and encourage companies to do more business In the United States.

SAFE is focused currently on a number of state and Federal proposals to tax unrealized gains. These proposals vary widely in their definitions of covered assets and affected households, but each fails to recognize the difficulty of producing reliable appraisals for illiquid assets (like real estate, privately held businesses, or intellectual property) year-to-year. These proposals also ignore how much asset values rise and fall over time. A tax on unrealized gains is, in practice, a “guess tax.” Auditing subjectively valued guess tax returns would require the IRS to appraise trillions of dollars in illiquid assets every year – a challenge our current tax system was designed specifically to avoid.

During the last Congress, SAFE successfully worked to educate voters nationwide about the STEP Act (a bill to eliminate the stepped-up basis provision in the federal tax code) and its negative consequences for farmers, family businesses, and parents who want to pass what they worked so hard to build in their lifetime onto their loved ones.