2025 News UMass Law News: Tabor Presents on Retirement Policy at UMichigan Law’s Social Equality and the Law Symposium

Professor Anna-Marie Tabor presents recent work Reverse Wealth Transfers: Providing Tax Relief for Workers Who Support Older Generations at UMichigan’s Social Equality and the Law Symposium.

The Michigan Journal of Law Reform invited Professor Anna-Marie Tabor to present her recent work at their Social Equality and the Law Symposium. Professor Tabor presented her latest article, Reverse Wealth Transfers: Providing Tax Relief for Workers Who Support Older Generations. University of Michigan Professor Ed Fox moderated a discussion about Professor Tabor’s proposal to allow working family members to contribute to their older relatives’ Roth IRAs.

Tabor’s article argues that the U.S. tax code should do more to help working adults who support older people. In many families, younger generations play a significant role in supporting older relatives who have not had the economic opportunities to accumulate retirement savings during their own working years. These support obligations may prevent workers from contributing to their own retirement accounts or to 529 accounts to save for their children’s educational expenses. In addition to losing the opportunity to save for these important financial goals, they also lose out on the tax subsidies that they could have accrued by contributing the money to tax-advantaged accounts that exist for these purposes.

The U.S. tax code does not include a tax-advantaged vehicle to help younger generations prepare to support their older relatives. Tabor identifies this as an underexamined bias in the tax and retirement system, and also a racial equity issue, as African American and Latino households provide financial support to older family members at higher rates than do other demographic groups.

The article proposes allowing younger working adults to make “Adult Generational Empowerment Contributions” or “AGE Contributions” to their older-adult relatives’ Roth IRA accounts. Allowing these contributions would provide a much-needed boost to family savings. The proposal also helps to addresses inequities in the tax and retirement system by directing tax subsidies to families with “reverse wealth transfers” from younger to older generations.

Tabor’s article is scheduled to be published in The University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform in the Spring of 2026.