A fair tax code fails if the largest fortunes can route around it. The Accord closes the conversion games that turn labor into capital gains, income into unrealized appreciation, inheritance into tax-free basis step-up, philanthropy into donor-controlled tax avoidance, and gifts into estate-tax escape.
The exit tax (40% on net worth above $10M exemption + realization of accrued gains) prices the patriarch's expatriation. It does not, by itself, price the generational round-trip. A family that expatriates the patriarch — paying the exit tax on then-current assets — can hold those assets abroad through one or two generations of growth in low-tax jurisdictions, and send heirs back to the US to deploy the now-grown wealth. The original expatriation paid the toll; the heir's later re-entry, with sheltered intergenerational growth, today pays nothing.
The route is structural: it requires only that the family be willing to live abroad for a generation. At very high net worth, that opportunity cost is small relative to the tax savings.
The Generational Repatriation Tax is a US-side excise levied when a returning heir re-establishes US tax residence and the heir's wealth derives in part from a patriarch who previously expatriated. The excise prices the foreign-sheltered growth between expatriation and return — the period during which US-source institutional infrastructure (deepest capital markets, contract enforcement, NIH/DARPA research stack, dollar reserve currency) was inaccessible to the family but available again at the moment of return.
Reach: two heir generations from the original expatriation, parallel to the wealth-and-estate heir-extension architecture (HARO statute reach: life of holder + two generations of heirs). Calibration: rate set against the foreign-sheltered growth, not the inherited principal — the patriarch's exit tax already priced the principal at departure.
Heirs of patriarchs who expatriated under the exit-tax regime, when those heirs re-establish US tax residence within the two-generation reach. The architecture targets the specific multi-generational tax-avoidance pattern, not casual returnees or families with no expatriated patriarch. Most international families face no exposure.
Heirs whose patriarch never expatriated. Heirs returning beyond the two-generation reach. Heirs whose foreign-sheltered growth is below the de minimis threshold. The architecture does not punish international mobility — it prices the specific arbitrage where expatriation served as a tax-planning waypoint.
Pending canonical scoring.
Modest direct revenue. Primary effect is closing the rate-arbitrage incentive that today makes generational expatriation a viable estate-planning route at the largest fortunes. As the round-trip pays roughly what staying would have paid, the planning math no longer favors the multi-generational departure.
See tax ladder · fiscal scoring
- One-generation skip
- Heir returning within first generation pays the repatriation excise on the foreign-sheltered growth period.
- Two-generation skip
- Reach extends to grandchildren of the original expatriate. Beyond two generations, the architecture's reach ends.
- Naturalization-then-return
- Heirs born abroad to expatriated parents who later naturalize and re-enter face the same trigger as ordinary heirs.
- Citizenship gymnastics
- The trigger is US tax residence, not citizenship. Renouncing-and-re-acquiring citizenship does not avoid the residence test.
The expatriate-then-return-the-heirs route closes through reach-extension to heirs.
- Exit tax
- 40% exit tax + accrued-gain realization prices the patriarch's departure. Generational Repatriation prices the round-trip on the heir's return.
- Estate-tax prepayment
- Wealth-and-estate heir-extension reaches two generations for undeclared assets. Generational Repatriation reaches two generations for the expatriation route. Same architectural reach pattern, different avoidance route.
- HARO statute
- Whistleblower bounty applies to undisclosed expatriation-then-return arrangements.