The U.S. Supreme Court resolved a split among the circuits, holding that assets in non-spousal inherited individual retirement accounts are not exempt or protected from claims of the heir’s creditors. Clark v. Rameker, 573 U.S. ___ (2014) (No. 13-299; June 12, 2014).
“Inherited” IRAs hold funds from persons who established Individual Retirement Accounts for their own use and died before depleting the funds in those accounts. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the judgment by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals {In re Clark, 714 F.3d 559 (7th Cir. 2013)}.
Readers may recall that, according to at least one bankruptcy court, chapter 9 debtors are not required to obtain bankruptcy court approval of compromises and settlements.
On June 12, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Clark v. Rameker, 537 U.S. __ (2014), resolving a difference between federal circuit courts on the issue of whether an inherited IRA is excluded from the bankruptcy estate under section 522(b)(3)(C) of the federal Bankruptcy Code, which exempts retirement funds from the bankruptcy estate. Recall that an inherited IRA is one that has come to a beneficiary by reason of surviving the participant whose retirement funds had been amassed during their lifetime for their own retirement.
On June 12, 2014, the Supreme Court held that assets of an “inherited IRA” are not exempt from the IRA holder’s bankruptcy estate and are subject to the claims of creditors in bankruptcy. (Clark v. Rameker, Sup. Ct. Slip Op. No. 13-299, affirming In re Clark, 714 F.3d 559 (7th Cir. 2013). In Clark, the petitioner, Heidi Heffron-Clark, inherited an IRA worth approximately $450,000. The IRA was originally established by the petitioner’s mother as a traditional IRA and became an inherited IRA upon her death in 2001.
As bankruptcy practitioners will recall, the Supreme Court held in Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S., 131 S.Ct. 2594, 2620 (2011) that bankruptcy courts, as non-Article III courts, “lack[] the constitutional authority to enter a final judgment on a state law counterclaim that is not resolved in the process of ruling on a creditor’s proof of claim,” even though Congress had classified these types of proceedings as core – and thus authorized federal bankruptcy courts to hear and decide them.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals in In re SW Boston Hotel Venture, LLC, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 6768 (1st Cir. Apr. 11, 2014) recently ruled on a number of issues critical to valuing a secured claim in bankruptcy. Specifically, the court 1) endorsed the use of a “flexible approach” to value collateral under the circumstances of this case, 2) recognized that the date collateral should be valued is the lender’s burden to prove, and 3) confirmed that the pre-petition agreement’s default interest rate should generally be used to determine the post-petition interest rate.
Q: When is a retirement account not a retirement account?
A: When it's an inherited IRA and the owner is bankrupt.
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