She'll get dinged with either estate taxes or gift taxes. Generally, it's considered better to give you money away because it's tax exclusive, but even that advice is now questionable because of the unknown status of the estate tax.
Because of the uncertainity surrounding the future of the estate tax, effective planning is really not very easy right now.
That's absolutely NOT true. Locally...we have Bill Gates (and his dingbat father who PROMOTES the Estate Tax).
The tools are well known from all the public discourse.