Background
Jeffrey Tott died in 2023 with an estate valued at more than $55 million. His 2008 will poured the residue into a revocable trust and directed that death taxes be paid from the trust principal. Tott was unmarried when he signed those documents. He later married Brandy Bock-Tott but did not revise the will before his death.
Because the marriage occurred after execution of the will, Pennsylvania’s pretermitted-spouse statute entitled Bock-Tott to the share she would have received had Tott died intestate. The estate proposed a fifty-fifty division between her and the trust. A dispute then arose over whether inheritance and estate taxes should be deducted before making that division or charged entirely against the trust’s half under the will’s tax clause.
The Allegheny County Orphans’ Court ruled that the gross estate should first be divided, after which the trust alone would pay the death taxes. Anna Marie Torres, the successor trustee and Tott’s former spouse, appealed. She argued that Tott could not have intended the tax clause to enhance the statutory share of a spouse he had not contemplated in 2008.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Bowes, writing for the Superior Court, affirmed. The will unambiguously stated that death taxes were payable from trust principal. Pennsylvania’s rule granting an intestate share to a spouse who marries the testator after execution of a will did not erase or rewrite that separate tax-allocation direction.
The panel distinguished the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in In re Corso’s Estate. There, a tax clause intended to benefit the testator’s then-wife became ineffective when the couple divorced, and it could not later be revived to benefit a second spouse. Tott, by contrast, had already divorced Torres before executing the 2008 documents. No provision favoring a former spouse was nullified by a later divorce.
The tax clause here was a general administrative direction rather than a benefit drafted for a particular spouse. Its operation did not depend on who ultimately received the other share of the estate. The court therefore enforced its plain meaning: Bock-Tott receives her statutory fifty-percent share, and the trust receives its share before bearing the death-tax obligation assigned to it by the will.
Key Takeaways
- A later marriage can give a surviving spouse an intestate share under 20 Pa.C.S. § 2507(3) without nullifying unrelated provisions of an earlier will.
- An unambiguous direction to pay death taxes from trust principal can leave the pretermitted spouse’s statutory share unreduced.
- A tax clause associated with a divorced beneficiary presents a different problem from a neutral administrative clause executed while the testator was unmarried.
- Pennsylvania courts enforce clear testamentary language even when later family events produce a distribution the testator may not have specifically anticipated.
Why It Matters
Estate of Tott is nonprecedential, but it illustrates how tax-allocation clauses can shift millions of dollars between beneficiaries. Estate planners should revisit wills and trusts after marriage, divorce, or other major family changes and expressly state whether taxes attributable to a statutory or nonprobate share are apportioned to that share.
For fiduciaries and litigators, the decision separates entitlement from tax burden. A statute may determine the percentage passing to a later spouse, while the governing instrument still determines which fund pays estate and inheritance taxes. The text of both the will and incorporated trust must be read before assuming taxes come off the top.