AS 13.36.370–.375
Alaska
Directed Trust.
Research Alaska directed trusts under AS 13.36.370–.375, including adviser directions, trustee protections, protector powers, information flow, tax issues, and succession.
By Alaska Trust & Estate Authority Editorial Team
Alaska law permits a trust to place particular decisions with an adviser while leaving custody, records, tax work, or other administration with a trustee. That division can accommodate specialized investment knowledge, independent distribution judgment, and family participation, but it also creates handoffs where information, authority, and timing can fail.
Draft from a decision inventory rather than an organization chart. For every investment, distribution, tax election, amendment, appointment, and administrative act, identify who decides, in what capacity, with which information, by what deadline, and what happens if the person is silent, conflicted, or unavailable. The office title alone proves none of this.
Holds assigned powers
The trustee retains every duty not effectively shifted and must perform the administrative role the instrument gives it.
Advises or directs
Alaska treats a merely advisory role differently from a mandatory direction role.
Holds specified oversight powers
The instrument can grant trustee succession, amendment, beneficiary-interest, or power-of-appointment authority.
Need an intelligible system
Requests, explanations, statements, complaints, and conflicts should reach the correct office.
Read the verb in AS 13.36.375
Authority stays with the trustee unless the instrument makes the adviser’s direction mandatory.
When an adviser may provide advice but the trustee is not required to follow it, AS 13.36.375(b) leaves the decision power and responsibility with the trustee; the adviser is nonfiduciary by default. When the instrument requires the trustee to follow the adviser, subsection (c) protects the directed trustee for compliance and removes duties to review, inquire, investigate, recommend, or evaluate the direction.
In the mandatory-direction structure, the adviser is a fiduciary to the beneficiaries for the directions and has the exclusive duty to account and defend an action concerning them. The trust document may alter important defaults, so the operating answer always begins with both the statute and the exact instrument.
Trustee decides
The adviser supplies input; the trustee retains authority and responsibility unless the instrument changes the default.
Adviser decides
The trustee must follow and receives statutory protection for compliance within the directed field.
No implied backstop
A directed trustee does not have the listed review and warning duties merely because it implements the direction.
Follows the power
The directing adviser accounts for and defends the directions as a fiduciary under the statutory model.
Define the protector power by power
Alaska authorizes a protector office; the instrument determines what that office can actually do.
An Alaska trust may appoint a protector and grant powers including removal and appointment of trustees, amendment for tax or legal changes, modification of beneficiary interests, and modification of powers of appointment. A protector may not add a beneficiary who is not specified in the trust. Subject to the instrument, the statute says the protector is not liable or accountable as a trustee or fiduciary for protector acts.
That statutory default does not make broad powers self-executing or risk-free. The instrument should define purpose, standard, conflicts, notice, records, compensation, reliance, removal, vacancy, and the relationship between protector powers and adviser or trustee powers.
- List each power rather than relying on a general “all protector powers” clause.
- State whether the power is personal, fiduciary, or another defined capacity after legal and tax review.
- Require a signed record for amendments, removals, appointments, consents, and waivers.
- Name who receives notice and where the permanent record is stored.
- Provide a successor method that does not depend on an unavailable settlor or unanimous family agreement.
Map inputs through completion
Assign the valuation, cash, tax, communication, and follow-up work behind each signature.
A direction requires inputs, analysis, timing, execution, settlement, valuation, reporting, and follow-up. If a family adviser controls a private-company investment, the instrument should say who obtains valuations, reviews entity documents, approves capital calls, votes interests, monitors concentration, supplies tax data, and communicates liquidity needs.
The matrix should also handle mixed decisions. A distribution may require tax analysis and asset sales; an investment may affect cash available for mandatory payments. Define consultation without creating two holders of final authority over the same act.
Buy, hold, sell, vote
Address public securities, concentrated positions, entities, real estate, borrowing, valuation, and managers.
Requests and standards
Set required information, timing, discretion, tax withholding, payment method, and explanation procedures.
Elections and reporting
Identify who supplies data, chooses elections, signs returns, and resolves inconsistent directions.
Custody and records
Allocate title, cash movement, statements, notices, fees, contracts, litigation, and successor transition.
Engineer the handoffs
The divided structure is only as reliable as its direction and record protocol.
AS 13.36.080 requires the trustee to keep beneficiaries reasonably informed and to provide specified terms, information, and accounts on reasonable request, subject to the limited statutory exemption. A directed design should specify how the trustee obtains enough information from advisers to prepare accurate statements and answer beneficiary questions without assuming a monitoring duty the statute removes.
Use a shared calendar and permanent record protocol. Directions should identify the governing power, assets, requested act, valuation source, effective date, tax assumptions, and supporting documents. The trustee should confirm implementation without recasting that ministerial step as approval of the adviser’s judgment.
- Set a standard direction form and authenticated delivery channel.
- Require advance notice for transactions needing custody, liquidity, valuation, or tax work.
- Define who communicates with beneficiaries about a directed decision.
- Reconcile adviser records with trustee statements and entity or custodian records.
- Preserve rejected, withdrawn, superseded, and implemented directions.
Plan for silence, conflict, and vacancy
State who acts when the person holding final authority cannot.
The instrument should say what happens when an adviser dies, becomes incapacitated, resigns, loses a license, cannot be located, or has a conflict. It should also address a direction that is impossible, ambiguous, late, outside the adviser’s authority, or unlawful. A default path might suspend the affected action, transfer authority temporarily, appoint an independent successor, or permit court instruction.
Alaska’s trustee statutes separately address co-trustees, vacancies, resignation, removal, delivery of property, and reimbursement in AS 13.36.072–.078. Those rules should be coordinated with adviser and protector succession so one office does not remain operational while a necessary counterpart is vacant.
If the instrument removes the trustee’s duty to review an adviser, beneficiary communications should not imply that the trustee independently approved the adviser’s judgment.
Test powers before activation
Federal tax law follows the substance of a power, not its Alaska office label.
A settlor, spouse, beneficiary, or related person holding distribution, substitution, appointment, or amendment powers can affect grantor-trust status, gift completion, estate inclusion, and powers-of-appointment analysis. The state-law label “adviser” or “protector” does not control federal tax treatment. Each power and succession path needs separate federal review.
Before activation, prepare a responsibility schedule, service agreements, acceptance documents, direction forms, contact and authority records, fee disclosures, information protocols, tax workflows, and a vacancy playbook. Test the first anticipated distribution, investment, and tax decision from request through reporting.
Each Alaska-law proposition was checked against the official sources shown below. No qualified-human legal review is recorded.
Research record
Primary sources
- 01 Alaska Statutes, Title 13 — Decedents’ Estates, Guardianships, Transfers, Trusts, and Health Care Decisions
- 02 26 U.S.C. § 2036 — Transfers with retained life estate
- 03 IRS Instructions for Form 1041 — Grantor trust and fiduciary reporting
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The test should expose who owns authority, what information moves, which deadline applies, who implements, who explains the result, and who takes over after a vacancy.