By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — George Steinbrenner's shrewdest business move may have come in death.
The legendary Yankees owner's passing Monday happened to coincide with a one-year lapse in the federal estate tax, potentially saving his relatives as much as $600 million in taxes owed and preventing them from having to sell the New York Yankees.
The lapse resulted from a revamping of the estate tax in 2001, when the Bush administration lobbied for a progressive lowering of the levy on bequeathed estates, culminating in it's abolition in 2010, the Wall Street Journal explained.
Experts expected that Democrats would prevent the tax from lapsing when they gained control of congress, but the Senate failed to act before the 2010 deadline, the Journal said.
Though a new tax, which will impose a 55 percent levy on estates worth $3.5 million or more goes into effect in 2011, the relatives of people who die within the 2010 window will not, theoretically, have to pay a penny to the federal government, according to the paper.
This is good news for the descendants of Steinbrenner, whom Forbes estimated to be worth $1.1 billion before his death.
Had "The Boss" died just 6-months later, his beneficiaries might have owed $600 million to the IRS, an amount so large they might have had to sell the Yankees to afford it.
It's still possible that congress will attempt to levy a tax retroactively on the estimated 5,500 estates that managed to avoid the estate tax in 2010, but experts told the New York Times that wealthy beneficiaries of the loophole would fiercely battle such an attempt.
Even in death, Steinbrenner was doing what was best for the Yankees bottom line.
