Tax-wise, conservation easements have been around for decades. They were designed as a tax benefit to encourage the preservation of natural resources, but they’ve also become a popular tax avoidance vehicle. Who benefits most from those tax breaks?
Conserving nature—not paving over it—is "pretty cool," so much so that our tax code has for decades offered an tax incentive to do it through “conservation easements.” But a certain kind of scam has taken that incentive to another level entirely.