Research
on "fiduciary duty" under the Internal Revenue Code
26 U.S.C. 6903: Notice of Fiduciary Relationship
26 CFR §301.7701-6: Definitions; person, fiduciary
Title 26: Internal Revenue
PART 301—PROCEDURE AND ADMINISTRATION
Definitions§ 301.7701-6 Definitions; person, fiduciary.
[. . .]
(b) Fiduciary—(1) In general. Fiduciary is a term that applies to persons who occupy positions of peculiar confidence toward others, such as trustees, executors, and administrators. A fiduciary is a person who holds in trust an estate to which another has a beneficial interest, or receives and controls income of another, as in the case of receivers. A committee or guardian of the property of an incompetent person is a fiduciary.
(2) Fiduciary distinguished from agent. There may be a fiduciary relationship between an agent and a principal, but the word agent does not denote a fiduciary. An agent having entire charge of property, with authority to effect and execute leases with tenants entirely on his own responsibility and without consulting his principal, merely turning over the net profits from the property periodically to his principal by virtue of authority conferred upon him by a power of attorney, is not a fiduciary within the meaning of the Internal Revenue Code. In cases when no legal trust has been created in the estate controlled by the agent and attorney, the liability to make a return rests with the principal.
(c) Effective date. The rules of this section are effective as of January 1, 1997.
[T.D. 8697, 61 FR 66593, Dec. 18, 1996]
Revoking
Fiduciary Relationships-Alfred Adask
Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, page 625:
Fiduciary duty. A duty to act for someone else’s benefit, while subordinating one’s personal interests to that of the other person. It is the highest standard of duty implied by law (e.g. trustee, guardian).
Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, page 625:
Fiduciary or confidential relation. A very broad term embracing both technical and fiduciary relations and those informal relations which exist wherever one person trusts in or relies upon another. One founded on trust or confidence reposed by one person in the integrity and fidelity of another. Such relationship arises whenever confidence is reposed on one side, and domination and influence result on the other; the relation can be legal, social, domestic, or merely personal. Heilman’s Estate, Matter of, 37 Ill.App.3d 390, 345 N.E.2d 536, 540.
A relation subsisting between two persons in regard to a business, contract, or piece of property, or in regard to the general business or estate of one of them, of such a character that each must repose trust and confidence in the other and must exercise a corresponding degree of fairness and good faith. Out of such a relation, the law raises the rule that neither party may exert influence or pressure upon the other, take selfish advantage of his trust, or deal with the subject-matter of the trust in such a way as to benefit himself or prejudice the other except in the exercise of the utmost good faith and with the full knowledge and consent of that other, business shrewdness, hard bargaining, and astuteness to take advantage of the forgetfulness or negligence of another being totally prohibited as between persons standing in such a relation to each other. Examples of fiduciary relations are those existing between attorney and client, guardian and ward, principal and agent, executor and heir, trustee and cestui que trust, landlord and tenant, etc.