Estate duty in US on non-residents

Dear Mr Tan

I'm a keen follower of your blog and appreciate your efforts in educating the public on financial planning.

I attended a will writing talk recently and was informed that the US estate tax on assets such as stocks bought in the NYSE can be as high as 55%!  I have invested quite a bit in the ETFs listed on the NYSE and needless to say, I was quite stunned to hear about that.  I did some research about this and it seems there is an exemption provided the total value of assets owned is less than US$60,000 based on fair market value.

I have asked my broker about this, but they claimed that there won't be any estate duties on US stocks.  But this doesn't seem to be the case based on what is stated on these 2 sites:

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=156329,00.html (official word from the Internal Revenue Service)

http://www.ifa-sg.com/abolishment-estate-duty/ (opinion from a local Independent Financial Advisor)

If this estate tax does apply to Singaporeans owning US stocks, you might want to blog about this to inform the public as I believe there are quite a number of people who own them but are not aware of the tax.

REPLY
 I am not familiar with estate duty in US on non-resident. I shall post your email in my blog and see if there is some response from the experts.