01/12/2025
ESTATE TAX: A BURDEN NO GRIEVING FAMILY DESERVES
These past months, my brother and I have been working on the extrajudicial settlement of our sister’s estate. She worked hard all her life until retirement, lived quietly, never married, and left a modest estate. Yet despite the recent exemption for the family home, the process has still been long, expensive, and emotionally draining. And every new requirement felt like reopening the wound of losing her.
If this is difficult for us, how much more for families with fewer resources, no lawyers, and no guidance?
Across Asia, many countries have already removed estate or inheritance taxes, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Brunei, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Mongolia, Bhutan, among others. Australia and New Zealand have done the same.
They abolished the tax for one simple reason: Estate tax raises very little revenue, but it causes enormous hardship for ordinary people.
Here in the Philippines, inheritance is seldom about wealth. It is about a small house, a tiny lot, or farmland a parent worked on all their life. Yet heirs still face:
• Fees they cannot afford
• Paperwork they do not understand
• Penalties for delays they never intended
• Properties left frozen for decades because taxes were simply too heavy
Meanwhile, the wealthy quietly avoid estate taxes through trusts and legal structures. It is the poor who suffer, those who only want to keep the home their parents already paid taxes on again and again.
This is why so many nations moved away from estate tax. It traps families in grief and poverty, and turns hard-earned assets into “dead capital” that no one can use, sell, or develop.
So maybe it’s time to ask a deeper question: Why must we tax families at the moment they are hurting the most? Why must death come with a bill?
If our neighbors can choose compassion and common sense, perhaps the Philippines can choose it too, for dignity, for fairness, and for every Filipino family simply trying to move forward after a loss.
