Tax Incentives for Investments in Opportunity Zones: New Regulations Provide Clarity and More Questions

The 2017 Federal Tax Reform bill enacted a new set of tax incentives for investments in specially designated low-income communities (called “opportunity zones”) by qualified opportunity zone funds.

There has been considerable interest in the potential for setting up or investing in these funds, but to date this has been difficult since many significant aspects of the new rules were left to be fleshed out or determined through the regulatory process. The first set of proposed regulations were released on October 19, 2018 together with an IRS Revenue Ruling. This is the first step in what is likely to be a long rule-making process. These proposed regulations clarify many important issues, but many other material issues have been left to be addressed in a second set of proposed regulations (in the works), and comments have been requested. The attached alert memo describes the opportunity zone rules, as clarified by the new proposed regulations.