Do you pay taxes on inherited individual retirement accounts?
It all depends on the type of account that you inherit. Traditional individual retirement accounts are funded with pre-tax income. As a result, distributions to the account holder are taxable, so distributions to a beneficiary would also be taxable.
The taxation works in the reverse manner with a Roth individual retirement account. Taxes are paid before the assets are contributed into the account, so the distributions are not taxed. This applies to the original account holder and the beneficiary.