Is the Age 110 Requirement Arbitrary and Capricious?
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, there are 18 people in the United States who are age 110 or older.21 The same newspaper claims that an individual has a one in 5,000,000 chance of attaining such age.22 The tables relied upon by the IRS do not even recognize these long odds, as they assume that nobody will live past their 110th birthday.23 So is it arbitrary or capricious for the IRS to force us to assume that ALL taxpayers live that long? Whether it is arbitrary or capricious probably does not matter: the assumption that an annuitant will attain the age of 110, while seemingly the heart of the exhaustion test, plays very little role in the negative consequences of failing the exhaustion test. In fact, the exhaustion test would be no less a nuisance than it currently is if the age requirement were dropped to 100, and it would be no more of a nuisance if the age requirement were increased to 210. The reason is that while the exhaustion test must be carried out to the unreal
