Title 26: Internal Revenue
PART 301—PROCEDURE AND ADMINISTRATION
Definitions
[. . .]
(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]
Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 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, p. 625]
Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 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.
[Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 625]