I have great relationships with CPAs. I refer clients to them, I work alongside them, and I have never once thought a good CPA was doing anything other than exactly the job they were hired to do. A good CPA files your return accurately, based on the facts you give them.
But your estate plan is not a return. It is a set of structural choices made years — sometimes decades — before the return is filed, and those choices determine what facts exist in the first place. That is the gap where I live, and here are five places I see the gap show up most expensively in Texas estates.
Mistake One: Treating Community Property as Joint Tenancy
In Texas, community property and joint tenancy are different tax animals. Both halves of community property generally receive a full basis step-up at the first spouse's death. Joint tenancy with right of survivorship (JTWROS), by contrast, gives only a 50% step-up on the first death in most cases.
Married Texas couples routinely open brokerage accounts titled JTWROS because the account-opening form offered that option and the community-property option was either hidden or not offered at all. At the first death, a couple sitting on $1 million of unrealized gain in that account loses $500,000 of potential basis step-up because of a titling choice made 15 years earlier at a Schwab branch. The fix — a community-property agreement, or a properly titled community-property-with-right-of-survivorship election — is straightforward if it is done during life. It cannot be done after the first death.
Mistake Two: Inherited IRAs Under the SECURE Act
The SECURE Act changed the rules for inherited IRAs in a way that most families who set up trusts as IRA beneficiaries 10+ years ago have not fully internalized. Most non-spouse beneficiaries now have to empty the inherited IRA within 10 years — compressing distributions into a short window, often during the beneficiary's highest-earning years, at their highest marginal rates.
Trusts named as IRA beneficiaries fare worse than individual beneficiaries unless they are drafted as "see-through" conduit or accumulation trusts that comply with the updated regulations. A generic trust-as-beneficiary designation written in 2015 may produce a much worse tax outcome than the drafter intended. This is a review-every-plan-right-now item.
Mistake Three: Gifting Appreciated Property Too Early
Already covered in depth elsewhere — the short version: lifetime gifts carry over the donor's basis; assets held until death get a step-up. Highly appreciated stock, real estate, and crypto should almost never be gifted during life by families whose estate is comfortably under the federal estate-tax exemption. Financial advisors recommending "give the kids the appreciated shares while you're alive" are usually wrong about the tax math for the situation.
Mistake Four: Naming the Wrong Trust as IRA Beneficiary
A specific subset of Mistake Two: naming a credit-shelter trust, marital trust, or poorly drafted discretionary trust as the IRA beneficiary. For the IRA owner who wants to keep IRA assets out of the surviving spouse's estate — or to provide for children from a prior marriage — naming a trust sounds like the right answer. The tax consequences can be severe if the trust is not drafted to comply with the specific IRS rules for trusts holding retirement benefits.
The fix is to either name the spouse individually (losing some control) or to use a carefully drafted see-through conduit trust (retaining control but requiring specific drafting). Most families choose the control option without realizing the tax cost; a reviewable decision is better made with eyes open.
Mistake Five: No One Is Watching the 2026 Cliff
For families with estates between $7 million and $28 million, the 2026 estate-tax exemption reduction is a live issue — and one that requires coordinated attorney + CPA + financial advisor action before December 31, 2025. Use-it-or-lose-it gifting, SLAT funding, and GRAT strategies all require time to execute. Families that wait until the fourth quarter of 2025 will be competing with every other tax-planning attorney in Texas for appraiser, drafter, and filer time.
The CPA files the gift-tax return after the gifting is done. The estate planning attorney designs the gifting before it happens. Those are different roles. Both are necessary. Neither substitutes for the other.
The Practical Takeaway
If your estate plan was drafted more than five years ago, if you have appreciated assets, if you have retirement accounts going to trusts, or if your net worth is anywhere in the $5–$30 million range, you have earned a tax-integrated review. It is not that your CPA is doing anything wrong. It is that the questions they answer are downstream of the questions you should have been asking — or someone on your team should have been asking — years before.
If no one has been asking those upstream questions, we will.
Carla Alston holds a Master of Laws in Taxation from New York University School of Law and leads tax-smart estate planning at WG Law. Learn more or schedule a consultation.