With the Cincinnati Bengals now alone in first place in the AFC North Division, I thought it would be an opportune time to follow up last week's post (Tax Court Fumbles Substance-Over-Form Ball in Estate of Brown) and upload my article, Section 2036 Ruling May Force Bengals Out of Cincinnati, 67 Tax Notes 1504 (1995), on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Lee Sheppard has written recently in these pages of how the Service has assisted the estate planning objectives of plutocrats who own professional sports teams to keep their franchises in their local communities. (See Tax Notes, May 15, 1995, p. 881.) As Ms. Sheppard has explained, the Service recently approved an elaborate plan devised by the late Ewing Kauffman to keep the Royals baseball team in Kansas City. When Kauffman died in 1993, he left the team to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, and the Service recently blessed the estate's claimed charitable deduction by ruling that the foundation served the charitable purpose of keeping the team in Kansas City. Tech. Adv. Mem. 9518002 (Jan. 23, 1995), however, may force the Bengals football team to move out of Cincinnati by its use of the substance over form doctrine to recharacterize a transaction designed by the late Paul Brown to leave the team to his children.