IRS collected a gargantuan $7 billion estate tax from a single source, nobody knows who

Tax researchers are perplexed. The amount collected was so large, it caused the monthly collections to soar several SDs from the average

quote:

---

Treasury claims to have collected almost $10B in estate/gift taxes last month. What on earth. A figure so large that it's either a data error (it's in the PDF report, FWIW), or a weird IRS deadline I'm unaware of, or one of the ~10 richest Americans died. Any idea?

---

quote:

---

An even starker visual context. Totally swamps your typical April.

---

quote:

---

per new IRS data, we now know the payment came from Texas!

---

LINK

News article on this bizarre 7 billion dollar estate tax receipt that nobody knows where it came from

Can an American in the top 20 of wealthiest individuals die and nobody knows about it?

quote:

---

Sometimes it seems like billionaires can dominate our lives—or at least the news. A mystery in US tax data, however, suggests at least one super-wealthy individual flew under the radar until the very end.


The US Treasury’s daily reports of government financial transactions turned up a surprising data point on Feb. 28, 2023: The deposit of $7 billion in the category of “estate and gift” taxes. It was the highest collection of that kind of tax since at least 2005.

Based on the tax rate, that $7 billion payment implies an estate or gift of some $17.5 billion. However, the Tax Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C, has estimated that estates typically pay a 17% effective tax rate after exemptions and other forms of avoidance. Even if only 50% of the estate was taxable, that’s a potential value of $35 billion. Even the lowest estimate would make the estate’s owner one of the 100 richest people in the world, according to Bloomberg News.

---

TLDR: Estate tax data shows one the ten wealthiest Americans died 2 months ago, probably in Texas, and nobody knows who it is