Income Taxation of Fiduciaries and Beneficiaries (2024)

Byrle M. Abbin is a Managing Director, WTAS, LLC in McLean, Virginia. He received his B.B.A. with distinction from the University of Michigan and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has extensive experience in tax policy matters through congressional testimony, written analyses in tax journals, and is a member of various committees of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that have proposed legislative and regulatory recommendations. In this role, Mr. Abbin has appeared before the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, and various meetings including the Brookings Institution Conference on Tax Policy. His technical interests range from estate planning to the corporate alternative minimum tax, about which he edited and co-authored a treatise published by CCH. He has been a prolific speaker and writer in estatet planning matters, appearing before most major tax institutes and conferences. He has been especially involved in the ALI-ABA program on planning for Large Estates and in the University of Miami's Philip E. Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning, on whose advisory committee he serves. He is a former Director of the American Council for Capital Formation, The Tax Council,and a former Director and Chairman of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation. He served as Chairman of the AICPA Consumption Taxation Task Force. He is also a member of the AICPA Fiduciary Income Tax Task Force and serves on the AICPA Transfer Tax Task Force and GST Tax Task Force. He is a member of the program and policy committee of the Tax Foundation, and the Advisory Board of numerous tax journals. In 2001, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants bestowed on Mr. Abbin the Arthur J. Dixon Award, the accounting profession's highest award for tax service in a career of service with distinction in the field of taxation. In 2004, as part of the initial group of practitioners selected for the designation, the National Association of Estate Planners & Councils awarded him the status of Distinguished Accredited Estate Planner for his contribution to the promotion of estate planning expertise nationally. In 2008, the NAEPC presented him with the Hartman Axley Lifetime Service Award in recognition of distinguished service to the estate planning profession.

Frances Way Schafer, a retired Executive Director, served in the Washington National Tax Office of Grant Thornton LLP as a resource in areas involving fiduciary income tax, estate, gift and generation-skipping transfer taxes, and individual income tax and taxation of subchapter S corporations. She served a similar role for five years at KPMG. Frances spent the previous 30 years with the IRS, working as an Estate Tax Attorney in the Cleveland District before transferring to the Chief Counsel's National Office, where she worked in a variety of areas, ranging from corporate tax to tax shelters. During her last fifteen years at the IRS, Frances concentrated on issues in the areas of estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer taxes, and fiduciary income tax, including the treatment of regular trusts, charitable split-interest trusts, and trusts that are shareholders in S corporations. For her last five years at the IRS, she was a counsel to the Associate Chief Counsel for Passthroughs and Special Industries, and in that capacity she reviewed all regulations and published guidance affecting those areas. She graduated from Sweet Briar College with an A.B. and from Cornell Law School with a J.D. She served on the AICPA's Trust, Estate, and Gift Tax Technical Resource Panel for many years including two years as its chair. She currently is a member of the AICPA's Tax Executive Committee.