inheritance tax

Only if it dies with an estate worth more than the IHT threshold for dogs.

Yes, unless you are married to it. IHT is charged to the estate, it doesn't matter where the money goes unless it's to your spouse. The first 250k or so is tax free.

How about leaving me the 100k and I will look after your dog when you are gone.

No. Neither it nor anyone else pays inheritance tax. IHT is levied on the estate not on the person (or creature) that inherits.

Thom

expect that charitable donations are also tax free. Perhaps it would be possible to leave the money to a charity with the proviso that they look after the dog, perhaps you could set up your own charity with the same aim

tim

Attaching such strings would disqualify the donation as charitable.

It's not possible to set up a "charity" to benefit a specific individual dog, otherwise you could similarly define your own children as charity cases and so circumvent IHT altogether.

That's using a rather disingenuous definition of "anyone". An estate, in this context, *is* someone, namely the deceased.

Of course you cannot legally give anything to a dog as dogs are not recognised as a legal person and capable of ownership. You would need to give it on trust to someone who could hold it for the benefit of your dog.

On the philisophical arguement of whether a dead person is someone or merely a cadaver, and what makes a person - try alt.philosophy. My own preference is that a person can only be someone who is alive. This is the position taken in law as a deceased cannot do anything.

I have no argument with that. I was merely addressing the charitable aspect of the question.

I'm not making a philosophical point, but one thing the deceased *can* do is pay IHT. He cannot, obviously, do so in the flesh, but his representatives, the executors, do it on his behalf.

Thom correctly stressed that it is not the heirs who pay the tax, but that it is levied on the estate of the deceased. The estate is not a person, but is the wealth left behind by the deceased person. To say IHT is levied on the estate just means that the amount of tax payable is calculated on the basis of the value of this estate, and is collected from its administrators before the funds are distributed among the heirs. This is as opposed to the way it works in some other administrations where each individual heir is taxed according to the size of their share of the estate, and on how closely related the deceased was to the heir.

Nevertheless, just because the estate is not a person, doesn't mean that "not anyone" pays the tax. Someone does, or it wouldn't get done. I find it useful to think of it as the deceased person himself paying it.

In message , a0000000000 writes

The law can regard a legal entity even if that entity is not alive in a medical sense. Hence, Trusts, Estates and Ltd Cos ell exist in legal terms. Unfortunately.

Why is that unfortunate? It just goes to show there is life after death after all.

That's a fair point (but technically open for counterargument), but the main issue is the estate pays IHT and whether the dog's inheritance is influenced by IHT depends on the whole estate. The OP seemed to imply that IHT is levied on the inheritor.

Thom