Abstract:
The last few decades have seen an unprecedented global wave of trust law reforms and an equally unprecedented global proliferation of trust service providers. Commentators hypothesize that this rapid process is harmful, eroding tax bases as well as protections accorded to trusts users’ creditors, spouses, children and other claimants. To test this hypothesis, I conducted an exploratory global survey of trust service providers. I found that trusts likely to subsist for more than a Century are fairly common; that trustee exculpatory terms are now a conventional, nearly universal standard in donative trusts serviced by professionals, without settlors receiving any quid-pro-quo for their inclusion; that techniques protecting beneficiaries’ entitlements under trust from their creditors are nearly universal in trusts serviced by US-resident providers and fairly common in other trusts; and that settlor control of trusts, whether or not resulting from the exercise of expressly reserved powers, is far more common in trusts serviced by US-resident providers than in other trusts.
Hofri-Winogradow, Adam S, How Harmful is Trust Proliferation? (July 10, 2015).
First posted 2015-07-14 06:47:38
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