Fiduciary/Trust Tax Services

What EY can do for you

We understand that your fiduciary tax and information reporting compliance obligations are significant. The challenges relating to 1099 reporting have grown in complexity due to legal and regulatory changes in recent years. Brokers must now report cost basis information including the appropriate adjustments for wash sales, amortization and market discount.

Additionally, a broker must properly report the income from widely held fixed investment trusts (WHFITs) and real estate mortgage investment conduit (REMIC) assets. The IRS penalties relating to incorrect information returns or noncompliance have more than quadrupled in the past five years, creating significant risks to reporting entities.

Simple and complex trusts, grantor trusts, estates, charitable trusts and foundations all have unique reporting requirements that require specialized skills. Your responsibilities present a myriad of challenges, including:

• Managing the cost of your fiduciary tax responsibility
• Handling a growing workload as business expands
• Staying current on regulatory and complex tax law changes
• Developing processes to reduce the risk of mistakes and penalties for noncompliance
• Accommodating diverse client needs

Taking advantage of our experience can help you uphold your fiduciary duty, lift the burden of tax preparation and focus on other vital obligations of trusteeship.

How EY can help

Many financial institutions and law firms rely on our team to facilitate timely and accurate preparation of fiduciary tax filings. Our experience provides us with the insight and know-how to respond to your specific needs and develop a plan of action to efficiently and effectively manage fiduciary tax responsibilities. We can help you with your efforts to:

• Enhance the quality of your tax practice by leveraging leading practices and the breadth and depth of our global resources
• Reallocate internal resources to focus on core business initiatives
• Reduce rising costs attributable to compensation, benefits and training, as well as the increasing challenge of recruiting and retaining an in-house fiduciary tax team
• Reduce the risks of IRS and state penalties related to mistakes and noncompliance

Although filing happens once a year, managing fiduciary tax compliance is a year-round endeavor. Working with our Fiduciary/Trust Tax Services professionals can reduce the need for last-minute processing and filing, saving time, and can support a positive return on investment.

Our demonstrated processing methodology includes:

• Continual review of bridged data
• Full retrospective quarterly tax worksheet audits
• Enhanced use of software tools and resources to automate the review process and correction of missing or erroneous data
• Routine tax research and consulting

Using current software, our professionals are able to provide ready access to completed returns, tax letters and other reports. Our proprietary collaboration tool, EY Share Trust, supports effective governance of the outsourcing relationship by providing enhanced communications management, secure exchange of documents, status tracking and reporting on key performance indicators.

EY Share Trust provides a single web-based portal that improves productivity and provides increased transparency, supporting exceptional client service.

EY Share Trust helps you and our team to:

• Effectively manage engagement communications
• Exchange documents required to support timely, accurate preparation of information statements and tax returns
• Track the status of key milestones and open issues affecting service delivery
• Facilitate authorization of filings
• Track progress toward completion of information statements and tax returns
• Track tax authority notifications and collaborate on responses
• Monitor compliance with key performance indicators and service-level agreements

About us

Fiduciary/Trust Tax Services is part of the broader EY Private Client Services, which offer domestic and cross-border tax services to high-net-worth individuals and families, including corporate executives and business owners. We support you with:

• People. Our dedicated staff of more than 370 full-time, US-based tax professionals has an average of 17 years of trust tax experience, providing outsourcing support to a wide spectrum of clients with trust accounts of varying levels of complexity and an array of trust accounting systems.
• Process. Our integrated process – planning, monthly data and transaction review, timely resolution of issues and continuous communication – is a key to successfully processing your tax returns.
• Technology. Our investments in emerging technology and proprietary tools help reduce risk, increase transparency, and enable greater efficiency and accuracy in production of tax information statements and returns. Harnessing the power of technology allows our team to focus their tax technical proficiency and concentrate on managing more complex aspects of your trust tax compliance needs.
• Broad range of services. Our team is fully integrated with the EY global network of tax subject-matter professionals and can assist with complex filing requirements and planning needs. This includes foreign trusts, Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), oil and mineral leases, hedge funds, multistate income and franchise tax, generation skipping transfer (GST) tax, estate and gift tax, state and local tax, exempt organization and international tax, as well as personal financial planning. In addition, tax technical training, train-the-trainer and Tax Desk resources are available.