Georgia Conservation Easement Coalition Last updated September 9, 2026

Landowners & investors · State of Georgia

The land stays protected. Forever. The process did not stay fair.

A conservation easement is permanent by law. Once it is recorded, the development rights are gone — for this owner and every owner after. That protection is still standing on every acre. What has gone wrong is the enforcement machinery that followed.

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COUNTY ROAD PUBLIC ROAD FRONTAGE PARCEL EXCLUDED FROM EASEMENT ACCESS EASEMENT + BUILDING LOT UPLAND ~350 AC TIDAL MARSH ~265 AC 0 2,000 4,000 FT SCHEMATIC — NOT A SURVEY ACREAGES PER RECORDED DEED AND APPRAISAL FILED FOR RECORD COASTAL GA DEED OF EASEMENT DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS EXTINGUISHED IN PERPETUITY

01 · What perpetuity actually means

A recorded easement outlives every argument about it.

Under IRC §170(h), an easement only qualifies if it is granted in perpetuity. It is a recorded instrument in the county land records. It binds the donor, the buyer after the donor, and every owner after that. There is no expiration date and no renewal.

An easement that prohibits residential subdivision does not merely discourage development. It removes the right — and with it, the value that right carried.

That is the trade the statute contemplates: a landowner permanently gives up the most profitable use of the land, and the public permanently keeps the open space, the habitat, the working forest, the marsh. The deduction is the consideration for a gift the public never has to renegotiate.

This matters to the current dispute in a specific way. Every easement now under audit is still in force. The IRS has disallowed deductions; it has not unwound a single conveyance. The land is protected either way.

Conservation purposes under §170(h)(4)(A)

  • Outdoor recreation by, or education of, the general public
  • Protection of relatively natural habitat for fish, wildlife, plants, or similar ecosystems
  • Preservation of open space — farmland and forest land included — where it yields significant public benefit
  • Preservation of historically important land areas or buildings

What the holder keeps, permanently

  • The right to inspect and enforce the terms against any future owner
  • Approval authority over uses the deed makes conditional
  • A recorded restriction that shows up in every future title search

02 · The Georgia stake

Georgia is where this policy is being decided.

The state expanded its conservation programs aggressively, the partnerships were organized here, the land is here, and the appeals run through the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. The consequences of federal enforcement policy land on Georgia counties first.

3 states

Georgia named among the three states that expanded conservation easement programs most aggressively in recent years.

CNBC, July 23 2026

11th Cir.

Georgia, Florida, and Alabama appeals concentrate in one circuit — making its rulings the practical national standard for southeastern easements.

Appellate posture

Still filing

A Georgia partnership was reported disputing a $6 million deduction denial in Tax Court as recently as July 22, 2026. New petitions keep arriving.

Law360, July 22 2026

The land itself

Coastal marsh and tidal creek frontage, hardwood and mixed forest, working timberland, and the agricultural acreage covered by Georgia's own Conservation Use Assessment under O.C.G.A. §48-5-7.4. These are ecosystems of statewide concern, and the easements over them are the reason they are not subdivisions today.

The people

Landowners who granted the easements, the sponsors who organized the partnerships, and investors who bought fractional interests — in some cases well under one percent. These were not passive holdings in the sense of indifference. Partners voted on what to do with the property, typically choosing among conservation, holding for future sale, and development. In these partnerships the vote for conservation carried by more than 95%, in favor of the option that permanently gave up the land's most profitable use.

What follows is not something investors manage, and never was. Under TEFRA's unified audit rules, partnership tax proceedings are conducted by a tax matters partner — a structure set by statute and written into the operating agreements investors signed. Liability determined there flows through to them personally. National coverage still treats "syndicated" as a verdict rather than a description. It is neither uniform nor settled.

03 · The record of IRS action

Eleven years, entered in order.

Marked entries are turns in the record — moments when a court or an oversight body found against the agency's own conduct.

2015

Press attention reframes the deduction

National coverage of easement deductions taken on golf course property shifts public framing from conservation tool to loophole. Scrutiny of the entire category follows.

Dec 2016

Notice 2017-10 designates listed transactions

The IRS designates syndicated easement deals exceeding a 2.5x basis threshold as listed transactions, triggering disclosure obligations and penalty exposure — issued without notice-and-comment rulemaking.

2017 – 2021

Blanket examination and technical challenges

The agency audits the category broadly and litigates on technical grounds — perpetuity language, condemnation-proceeds formulas, substantiation. Courts largely reject the technical theories. The Tax Court docket swells.

2022

Notice 2017-10 struck down

Mann Construction (6th Cir.) and Green Valley Investors (Tax Court) hold the notice invalid for Administrative Procedure Act violations. Neither decision has been overturned. The Tax Court recognizes limits on making substantive rules by notice.

2019 – 2026

Four settlement initiatives, roughly 40% take-up

Repeated time-limited offers fail to clear the docket. Persistently low participation across four rounds points to terms taxpayers could not accept rather than taxpayer intransigence.

2023

LakePoint Land II — a backdated penalty approval

The IRS settles in Tax Court after admitting it backdated a penalty approval form. The question of §6751(b) supervisory approval becomes a live procedural issue across other cases.

Mar 2026

NTUF publishes "Litigation by Default"

A review of 798 partnership easement cases filed 2011–2025 documents the agency's default litigating posture: a maximum zero-valuation position in 93% of cases and gross valuation misstatement penalties in 99%.

May 1 2026

TIGTA confirms backdating — $68M+ conceded

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration finds the IRS backdated §6751(b) penalty approval documents in seven conservation easement cases, and reports the agency conceded more than $68 million in penalties as a result. A Treasury oversight body, on the record, on the agency's own conduct.

May 13 2026

Fifth settlement initiative — IR-2026-65

A 90-day window per individualized letter. The charitable deduction is eliminated and replaced with an "other deduction" roughly equal to investor cash contributed; penalty at 10%, rising to 20% in a second 45-day window. Interest keeps accruing. After both windows close, resolution reverts to roughly 5–7% of the claimed deduction plus the 40% penalty.

Jun 2 2026

Senate Finance Republicans urge Treasury to hold firm

Sens. Grassley and Daines write Treasury Secretary Bessent asking that the settlement terms be faithfully enforced, citing the 2.5x basis cap enacted as §605 of SECURE 2.0 — which applies prospectively to donations made after December 29, 2022.

04 · What happened to IRS Appeals

The one neutral review, narrowed by degrees.

Before a tax dispute reaches court, a taxpayer is supposed to get one fair, independent review. That review happens at the IRS Independent Office of Appeals — an office that has existed since 1927, whose job is to resolve disputes without litigation, favoring neither the government nor the taxpayer.

Conservation easement partnerships can still get to Appeals. Many do. But over the past decade the review has been narrowed in three specific ways that matter to ordinary investors: it now often comes later, it can no longer hear certain arguments, and the office conducting it has been under real strain.

2013 – 2014

A promise of neutrality

The IRS launches the Appeals Judicial Approach and Culture project, intended to make Appeals operate more like a neutral reviewer and less like an extension of the examination team.

Oct 2016

The conference changes

The IRS ends the presumed right to meet an Appeals officer in person, moving most conferences to the telephone. It also revises its internal manual to let IRS counsel and the examination personnel who built the case attend the taxpayer's Appeals conference. If the Appeals officer decides they should be present, the taxpayer cannot object.

Before this change those personnel rarely attended. They made their case through the file. The conference itself belonged to the taxpayer.

2017 – 2018

The government's own watchdog objects

The National Taxpayer Advocate identifies the change as one of the most serious problems facing taxpayers, warning that it erodes the independence Appeals exists to provide. When practitioners ask that taxpayers at least be allowed to consent before examination personnel attend, the IRS considers the request and declines.

2019

Congress steps in

The Taxpayer First Act writes the Independent Office of Appeals into law at IRC §7803(e) and provides that access to Appeals shall be generally available to all taxpayers.

2022 – 2023

The timing question — decided against taxpayers

A conservation easement partnership sues after being denied an Appeals conference before the IRS issued its final partnership-level adjustment. The Eleventh Circuit rules against the partnership. The right to Appeals, the courts hold, contemplates taxpayers who have already received the agency's final determination.

We state this plainly because it went against taxpayers: the partnership lost. The point is not that the ruling was wrong as a matter of law — it is that the independent review Congress promised now typically arrives after the IRS has made its determination, not before.

Jan 2025

Certain arguments taken off the table

Final Treasury regulations list 24 additional categories of disputes Appeals will not consider, on top of the exclusions Congress itself enacted. Among them: whether an IRS Notice or regulation is legally valid.

That matters directly here. Courts have already held that Notice 2017-10 — the notice that triggered blanket audits of easement partnerships — was issued without required notice-and-comment rulemaking. Under the 2025 regulations a taxpayer cannot raise that argument at Appeals at all. It can only be raised in court, after years and substantial expense.

2025 – 2026

An office under strain

Appeals lost roughly 28% of its staff during 2025 amid a hiring freeze. Its outgoing Chief later wrote that when she arrived, practitioners were already reporting that Appeals officers were deferring to IRS valuation specialists who came to settlement conferences with fixed valuation ranges that did not reflect the individual taxpayer's facts or arguments.

What this does and does not mean

It does not mean easement partnerships have no right to appeal. They do, and conferences are held. What it means is narrower and more precise:

This is not an argument about what any piece of land is worth. It is an argument about process. A meaningful, independent review — early enough to matter, and broad enough to hear the central objection — is what the law promises. Passive investors who followed the rules in place at the time deserve that review.

Sources for this section

05 · Where this stands in 2026

The valuation fight is loud. The procedural failures are the story.

The coalition does not defend abusive shelters. The argument is narrower and harder to dismiss: the way these cases are being administered would be unacceptable regardless of who is right about the appraisals.

Latest · August 19, 2026

The IRS stopped its own clock.

On May 13 the agency began mailing standardized settlement offers, each carrying a fixed response window and a penalty that grew if you missed it. On August 19 — ninety-eight days later — it ended the program, stopped sending the letters, and withdrew every deadline attached to the ones already mailed.

The reason it gave is the part to read twice. The IRS said that standardized, unsolicited letters on a rolling basis, each with a fixed response period, are not well suited to the full range of conservation easement cases — because partnership agreements, insurance arrangements, and procedural posture differ materially from one case to the next, and those differences change when and how a taxpayer can evaluate an offer at all.

Strip out the administrative voice and that is an admission. One clock, run against cases the agency had not sorted, was the wrong instrument. Not the wrong price — the wrong method. Method is what this page has been arguing about from the beginning.

The same announcement creates an Office of Conservation Easements and directs it to work with Treasury on administrative and legislative options. That is the first time the agency has conceded in writing that some part of this may be beyond its own power to fix.

Read the rest of it too

The release says plainly that none of this signals a better offer. The numbers did not move. The same terms remain available to anyone who asks. Elections already made under the May 13 framework stand and will be processed exactly as written — so the people who took the deal because a deadline was running get nothing back for it. No examination pauses. No Tax Court case pauses. No appeal pauses. No collection stops. The clock stopped. The arithmetic did not.

An admission is not a remedy. The letters stopped; the assessments did not. Every taxpayer in this docket stands exactly where they stood on August 18 — holding a deduction taken under a statute Congress had made permanent, disallowed years afterward under guidance a federal court struck down, with interest still running on the difference.

That is the part no announcement reaches. The rule changed midstream. The conduct did not. These investments were made when the law said what it said, on appraisals prepared to the standards then in force, and disclosed on returns filed on time. The standard arrived later and was applied backward. The people absorbing the cost of that reversal are the ones who read the law as written and acted on it — which is the behavior the tax system is supposed to reward.

Source: IR-2026-95, August 19, 2026.

Update · August 25, 2026

Who will run it, and how big it is.

Bloomberg Tax reported on August 25 that Dan Huff will lead the new office. Huff is a lawyer who served as a legal adviser to President Trump, joining the White House in February 2020. Before that he was counsel to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, where he ran oversight investigations, and in 2019 he was General Deputy Assistant Secretary for enforcement at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, supervising a staff of roughly 400.

That is an oversight and enforcement-policy background rather than a tax-valuation one. Which way it cuts is not yet knowable. An office led by someone whose career has been spent examining how agencies conduct themselves is at least positioned to ask the questions this page raises. Whether it does is a separate matter, and we will report what happens rather than predict it.

The scale is worth noting alongside the appointment. The IRS official overseeing enforcement described the office as having just under ten subject-matter experts. Set against roughly a thousand pending cases, that is a small team for a docket the agency says will take years to clear — and it is the same official who said the May initiative was abandoned because there were too many differences between cases for a single approach to work.

Sources: Erin Schilling, Bloomberg Tax (August 25, 2026); Bloomberg Tax interview with IRS enforcement chief Jarod Koopman.

93%

of cases where the IRS asserted a maximum zero-valuation position

99%

of cases where gross valuation misstatement penalties were imposed

~1,100

partnership cases pending or inbound — roughly 700 in Tax Court, 400 in examination

~10 yrs

typical time from filing to resolution, with interest accruing throughout

Source: NTUF, "Litigation by Default," Tax Notes, March 23 2026

What those four numbers do when you put them together.

Read individually they are statistics. Read together they describe a mechanism. The agency's opening position is the maximum available one — the property is worth nothing, and the penalty is the highest tier — asserted not in the unusual case but in nearly every case. That is a posture, not a finding.

Then time does the rest. A case takes years to resolve, and interest accrues on the disputed amount for every one of them, at a pace the taxpayer does not control. Each settlement window opens against a larger accumulated balance than the last. By the fifth initiative, the arithmetic of accepting terms has changed even though nothing about the underlying facts has.

The result is settlement pressure that operates independently of whether any particular deduction was sound. A taxpayer with a strong position and a taxpayer with a weak one face the same compounding clock. The forum is open — the Tax Court is public, its opinions are published, and taxpayers have prevailed there on exactly the procedural grounds described on this page. But reaching it takes years and costs more than most of the individual amounts in dispute. For most people the practical choice is not between winning and losing. It is between settling and waiting.

What we are asking be fixed

  • Stop the default maximum posture — and the interest it earns. A zero-valuation position in 93% of cases and top-tier penalties in 99% is a litigating stance, not a case-by-case finding. Because interest accrues on the disputed amount for the decade a case takes to resolve, that stance converts delay into leverage. Positions should be developed on the individual record, and taxpayers should not bear compounding interest for years of agency-driven delay.
  • Finality first. Computational adjustment notices should not issue while the partnership-level determination is under active appellate review. IRC §7481 defines when a decision becomes final; collection should follow that line.
  • No collection during pending review. Balance-due notices arriving while a Taxpayer Advocate case or examination inquiry is open put taxpayers in a channel with no available forum.
  • Penalty approval integrity. TIGTA has now documented backdated §6751(b) approvals. Every case resting on an approval of uncertain date deserves independent verification.
  • The remedy now lies with Congress. Investors do not manage these proceedings by design: TEFRA's unified audit rules place them with a tax matters partner, and every operating agreement here says so in terms investors signed. They participated in a program that existed in the code, followed the rules as written, and chose conservation over development. The rules were then applied against them retroactively, under guidance courts later struck down. Where administrative and judicial channels have not corrected that, legislation is the remaining path.

What we are not arguing

  • That the deduction should go unpoliced. Congress addressed the concern directly in 2022 with the 2.5x basis cap — prospectively, which is how policy is supposed to change. Our objection is to retroactive enforcement under guidance courts have struck down.
  • That every appraisal was sound. Valuation is genuinely disputed and courts have ruled against taxpayers repeatedly.
  • That any specific appeal should be decided by public pressure. Advocacy addresses administration and policy, not the merits of a pending case.
  • That the deduction needs no oversight. It needs oversight that follows its own procedures.

Outside coverage has begun to make the distinction. A former IRS national fraud counsel, quoted in CNBC's July 23 piece, put it plainly: a properly supported conservation easement is not a loophole. The same observation is now being made in outlets that agree on very little else — collected below.

06 · In the press

The same finding, from outlets that agree on little else.

The coalition takes no position in any partisan dispute. What follows is a record of where the procedural argument has surfaced independently — in a taxpayer research organization, in business reporting, in a trade publication, and on an opinion page. The agreement across them is the point.

National Taxpayers Union Foundation · Tax Notes

March 23, 2026

Litigation by Default: How the IRS Turned Conservation Easements into a Court Crisis

A review of 798 partnership easement cases filed 2011–2025 documents the agency's default litigating posture: a maximum zero-valuation position in 93% of cases and gross valuation misstatement penalties in 99%.

This is the empirical basis for the four figures in the preceding section.

CNBC · Hayley Cuccinello

July 23, 2026

Conservation easements: How they work and why the IRS cracked down

General-audience business reporting that separates the abusive syndications from the underlying deduction. A former IRS national fraud counsel, quoted in the piece, states the distinction directly: a properly supported conservation easement is not a loophole.

Read at CNBC ↗

Law360

July 22, 2026

Ga. Partnership Disputes Denial Of $6M Easement Deduction

Trade coverage of a Georgia partnership's challenge, in the specialist publication tax practitioners read. Georgia partnerships appear in this docket repeatedly — the enforcement pattern is concentrated here, which is why a Georgia coalition exists.

Fox News Opinion · Stephen Moore

August 6, 2026

The IRS became judge, jury and executioner in a tax-code witch hunt against Americans

An opinion column, and plainly written as one. Its substantive contribution is a concession the coalition also makes, arrived at from a different direction:

"If there are bad actors, of course, they should be punished" — but evidence that some promoters abused the deduction, Moore argues, does not license presuming every transaction was fraudulent or every investor a knowing participant.

Moore also restates the May 2026 Treasury Inspector General finding: seven cases involving backdated penalty-approval documents, and more than $68 million in penalties conceded.

Read at Fox News ↗

Just the News · Ashe Short

August 31, 2026

He turned down millions of dollars of solar money to save his farm. Then came the audit.

A third-generation Colorado farmer declined solar developers' offers to lease 2,700 acres, then spent close to a million dollars on geologists, drilling firms, solar engineers, tax attorneys, and zoning and title experts to document a conservation easement instead. Three years later the IRS opened an audit and sent an examiner conducting his first one. The farmer says the agent questioned whether his family were really farmers, and never engaged the valuation on the merits — "you're guilty, but we'll let you off the hook if you sign this."

The report's systemic finding is the one that carries beyond a single farm. Across ten publicly available cases, taxpayer appraisals prepared by credentialed professionals reported $358.2 million in value above what the properties cost. The IRS recognized $1.57 million of that increment — a 99.56% reduction. The figure describes value above cost eliminated, not the agency valuing the underlying real estate at a half percent of its worth, and the distinction matters: every one of the ten reductions exceeded 98%, and nine exceeded 99%. No independent IRS technical site visit was identified in any of the ten. All ten government geology reviews were desk reviews.

An appraiser who has testified in Tax Court, speaking anonymously, described the mismatch in preparation between the two sides as so wide that the parties are not appraising the same property.

Disclosure: the ten-case analysis described in this article is the work of Bernie Donachie, who is a partner in this coalition and holds interests in conservation easement properties. We link the reporting because it is now public and independently verifiable, not because it is independent of us.
Read at Just the News ↗

National Taxpayers Union · Coalition letter

March 10, 2021

Five years ago

Tax Administration Must Be Clear and Fair For Conservation Easements

A letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, signed by the National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Center for a Free Economy. It was written weeks into her tenure, and it named — in 2021 — nearly every procedural failure this coalition documents today.

Retroactive application of Notice 2017-10 to transactions predating it. A litigating posture the signers described as asserting zero or minimal value across the board. Audits constituents had called antagonistic and adversarial. Indifference to the supervisory penalty-approval requirement Congress enacted in 1998. Disregard for the Administrative Procedure Act in issuing guidance.

The ask was modest: convene a working group of stakeholders inside and outside government, on a 90-day deadline, to publish sample deed language — the same step the National Taxpayer Advocate had recommended and reiterated that January — and put it through public notice and comment.

No such working group was convened. The corrective steps that followed came from elsewhere: a court held Notice 2017-10 procedurally invalid in November 2022, and Congress legislated safe-harbor deed language in December 2022. The audits, the litigation, and the penalties continued throughout.

Read the letter at NTU ↗

On this collection. Linking is not endorsement. These outlets differ sharply on tax policy generally, and two of the four are opinion or advocacy writing rather than reporting — we label which is which rather than blending them. Where a piece assigns blame to a particular administration or party, the coalition does not adopt that framing: the enforcement campaign described here ran across administrations of both parties, and the remedy we seek is procedural and legislative, not partisan. Figures cited above are attributed to their original sources, which are listed in full at the foot of this page. Corrections are welcome through the form.

07 · Case watch

What courts find when the evidence is actually heard.

The government's opening position in these cases is usually a zero. What happens after trial is a separate question, and it is answered in published opinions anyone can read. We track those decisions here — favorable and unfavorable — with the numbers and the holdings, and a link to the opinion itself.

U.S. Tax Court · Judge Greaves

Decided August 17, 2026

Malibu Valley Land, LLC v. Commissioner

T.C. Memo. 2026-68 · Docket No. 20442-19

A conservation easement the IRS disallowed in full was found, after trial, to be worth approximately $19.7 million — and no penalties were imposed.

Claimed

$32.1M

IRS position

$0

Court found

≈$19.7M

Read the full analysis

The case

In December 2014 the partnership recorded a perpetual conservation easement over 297.84 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains, conveying it to the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a public agency. It claimed a deduction of $32,075,000 based on an appraisal by a licensed appraiser with four decades of experience in Los Angeles County. The Final Partnership Administrative Adjustment disallowed the deduction in its entirety, asserting a lack of donative intent and a failure to meet the technical requirements.

What the court held

  • The donation was a real gift. The court rejected the argument that the easement was a disguised exchange for development credits, finding the donation was not conditioned on any benefit and that the donee provided nothing in return.
  • The land had genuine development value. The property carried one of California's oldest vesting tentative tract maps. The court held those vested rights preserved the 1988 development standards for the portion outside the coastal zone, and valued the property portion by portion under the approaches each part supported.
  • No penalties applied. The 40% gross valuation misstatement penalty was unavailable because the claimed value did not reach 200% of the value the court found. On the alternative 20% penalties, the court held the partnership met the reasonable cause and good faith standard, having exercised ordinary business care and prudence in relying on a qualified, experienced appraiser.

What this case is not

Malibu Valley is not a syndicated partnership case. It arose from a direct donation in California, it turned on valuation and state land-use law rather than the procedural questions this coalition raises, and any appeal would go to the Ninth Circuit, not the Eleventh. The court also found the easement worth substantially less than the amount claimed — roughly forty percent less. We state all of that plainly, because a case is only useful as evidence if it is described accurately.

Why we are watching it

The relevance is not the outcome. It is the distance between the two ends of the case. The government's formal adjustment asserted that the correct deduction was zero. An independent court, after a full trial and expert testimony on both sides, found the easement was worth approximately $19.7 million — its own approximation, being the before value it determined less a $2 million after value the parties had conceded.

That is the same shape documented in the National Taxpayers Union Foundation's March 2026 review of 798 partnership cases, which found the agency asserted a maximum zero-valuation position in 93% of them. A zero is not a valuation. It is a litigating posture — one that costs a taxpayer years and substantial expense to test, and that in this instance a court did not accept.

The penalty holding matters independently. Good-faith reliance on a qualified appraiser remains a real defense, and it survived here even though the court's own figure came in well below the claimed amount. That is the distinction this coalition has drawn from the beginning: being wrong about a number is not the same thing as wrongdoing.

Source: Malibu Valley Land, LLC v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2026-68 (Aug. 17, 2026) (Greaves, J.), Docket No. 20442-19. Read the opinion (PDF). Comparative figure from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation review of 798 partnership conservation easement cases filed 2011–2025 (March 2026).

U.S. Court of Appeals · Eleventh Circuit

Decided July 16, 2026 · Published opinion

Savannah Shoals, LLC v. Commissioner

No. 24-12661 · Affirming the U.S. Tax Court

The taxpayer lost. We list this one first among our own citations, because a coalition that reports only favorable decisions is not reporting.

Claimed

$23M

IRS position

Disallowed

Court found

$480,000

Read the full analysis

The case

Savannah Shoals donated a conservation easement over a 103-acre property in Hart County, Georgia, and claimed a $23 million charitable deduction. The deduction rested on the theory that the land's highest and best use was an aggregate rock quarry. The IRS issued a Final Partnership Administrative Adjustment finding the deduction unsupported and asserting the 40% gross valuation misstatement penalty.

After a four-day trial, the Tax Court concluded that the easement qualified for a deduction but that the quarry use was not financially feasible, citing limited local demand, transportation costs, and competition from existing quarries closer to population centers. It adopted low-density residential and recreational use instead, valued the property at $580,000 before the easement and $100,000 after, and sustained the penalty.

What the appeals court held

  • The valuation loss was affirmed. The Eleventh Circuit upheld the rejection of the quarry theory, the resulting valuation, and the 40% penalty.
  • No fixed test for highest and best use. The taxpayer argued the Tax Court was required to apply a specific four-factor test. The court disagreed, holding that a focus on market demand and feasibility was appropriate under the law and regulations.
  • The government's expert stayed in. The taxpayer challenged the admissibility of the IRS's real estate expert on mining questions. The court found no reversible error, noting that the Tax Court's key conclusions rested on other experts' testimony.

Why we cite a case that went against taxpayers

Because readers deserve the full picture, and the full picture includes government wins. Courts have now spoken repeatedly, and often against taxpayers, on what a given piece of land is worth. Any account of this litigation that leaves those decisions out is not an account worth reading.

Source: Savannah Shoals, LLC v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, No. 24-12661 (11th Cir. July 16, 2026) (published opinion), affirming the underlying decision of the U.S. Tax Court. Read the opinion (PDF).

On this collection. Case watch entries summarize published decisions and link to the opinions themselves; nothing here is legal advice, and no entry is a prediction about any other case. We include decisions that went against taxpayers as well as those that did not — a record that only runs one direction is not a record. Corrections are welcome through the form.

08 · The policy paper

The argument, written for the people who can end it.

Everything above is the record. This is what we are asking be done about it — a resolution framework prepared for members of Congress and Administration officials, and offered for policy discussion rather than as a legal position.

The paper makes one structural argument: the conservation easement deduction was created by the IRS in 1964, codified by Congress in 1976 and 1980, expanded by Congress in 2006 after documented abuses, and made permanent in 2015. An enforcement program built after 2016 reversed that policy without legislation — and in 2022 the Tax Court held the instrument of that reversal, Notice 2017-10, procedurally invalid. When Congress actually wanted to change this policy, it legislated: a targeted, prospective 2.5x limit, enacted the same year.

From that record it proposes four things:

  1. Treasury should pause the May 2026 settlement initiative and replace terms that offer no charitable deduction at all with terms built on shared responsibility. A pause costs the government nothing and preserves every enforcement option.
  2. Reform the pending Certainty Act before passing it. The architecture is right, but its penalty structure is effectively retroactive, its basis computation is ambiguous, and its central metric — the deduction-to-investment multiple — measures sponsor economics rather than investor culpability.
  3. Hear from the taxpayers, not only the enforcers. For nearly a decade the public record on this controversy has been written almost entirely by the agencies bringing the cases.
  4. End it with clear, prospective guardrails — enacted by Congress, implemented through proper notice-and-comment rulemaking, enforced case by case on the evidence.

The paper takes no position on the valuation merits of any individual transaction, and it does not argue that abuse never occurred. It argues that the boundaries of a congressional policy are Congress's to draw.

09 · Get involved

This works when there are more of us than there are of me.

One taxpayer with a grievance is a story about one taxpayer. A documented pattern across many Georgia partnerships is a story about administration. Pick the one that fits you.

Who we are: a coalition of Georgia landowners, partnership sponsors, investors, and conservation supporters. We disagree with each other about plenty. We agree that these cases are being administered in a way that would be unacceptable regardless of who is right about the appraisals.

If you are affected

Add your fact pattern

Landowner, sponsor, or investor. Notice dates, letter types, timing relative to any pending appeal or Taxpayer Advocate case. Patterns across partnerships are what oversight bodies act on. Your name is never published without your written permission.

Submit your record ↓

If you have five minutes

Write your delegation

Georgia's senators and your House member each keep a constituent casework channel. Procedural complaints from constituents are logged and counted. Ask for one thing: no collection action while a determination is under appellate review.

Find your senators ↗

If you are a landowner or land trust

Say what the chilling effect costs

The clearest harm is the easement never granted. If enforcement risk has changed a conservation decision on your land or in your service area, that is evidence no litigation record contains.

Tell us what changed ↓

If you know someone who should hear this

Send us the introduction

Congressional and legislative staff, state officials, tax press, conservation organizations, trade associations. If you have a contact who should be aware of what is happening here — or who might open a door — forward it. Reach is the one thing a coalition has that an individual taxpayer does not.

Pass along a contact ↓

If you are a reporter or staffer

Ask for the documents

The coalition maintains sourced correspondence with Treasury, TIGTA, the Taxpayer Advocate Service, and the Georgia delegation, plus a media landscape brief updated as the record develops. Available on request.

Request the brief ↓

Join the coalition list

No cost, no obligation, no legal representation. You will receive the landscape brief and notice of filings and meetings.

Prefer not to type it out? Call or text 943.224.5050 and we will take it down with you. Either way, nothing is published without your written permission.

Public identification is always your choice. Coalition members are never named in op-eds, press outreach, or filings unless they specifically ask to be.