(a) Person. The term person includes an individual, a corporation, a partnership, a trust or estate, a joint-stock company, an association, or a syndicate, group, pool, joint venture, or other unincorporated organization or group. The term also includes a guardian, committee, trustee, executor, administrator, trustee in bankruptcy, receiver, assignee for the benefit of creditors, conservator, or any person acting in a fiduciary capacity.
(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.
The preliminary Code is a preliminary release of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (the "Code") by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel and is subject to further revision before it is released again as a final version. The source of the preliminary Code used in TouchTax is available here: https://uscode.house.gov/download/download.shtml. The Code is a consolidation and codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the U.S. prepared by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Treasury Regulations are a codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register by the departments and agencies of the federal government. The version of the Treasury Regulations available within TouchTax is part of the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations which is not an official legal edition of the Code of Federal Regulations but is an editorial compilation of CFR material and Federal Register amendments produced by the National Archives and Records Administration's Office of the Federal Register (OFR) and the Government Publishing Office. The source of the CFR used in TouchTax is available here: https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/ECFR/title-26. Those using TouchTax for legal research should verify their results against the printed versions of the Code and Treasury Regulations. TouchTax is copyright 2024 by Com-Lab (Mobile). Learn more at http://touchtax.edrich.de.