William Guest

The primary focus of Bill’s practice is the area of taxation and, in particular, income, gift, estate, and generation skipping taxes. Most of his work is spent on the planning and implementation of transactional strategies to minimize taxation.

The areas of gift, estate, and generation skipping taxation are often intertwined. So, effective planning has to take all of those into account in structuring any wealth transfer transaction. Implementation often requires drafting wills, trusts, and various forms of business organization documents. Bill has drafted thousands of wills over his career, ranging from the very simple to the very complex, as clients’ situations and goals vary widely. 

Trusts are created for many different purposes. Bill has drafted revocable trusts for estate planning and asset management, as well as many different types of irrevocable trusts, including gift trusts, life insurance trusts, charitable (lead and remainder) trusts, intentionally defective grantor trusts, personal residence trusts, spousal lifetime access trusts, and zeroed-out grantor remainder annuity trusts.

Closely tied to the planning is the carrying out of a decedent’s wishes, accomplished by the probate of wills throughout Colorado for those who die residing in Colorado or elsewhere, and the administration of trusts. Bill has done gift and estate tax compliance work involving the preparation of gift tax returns, estate tax returns, and fiduciary income tax returns. There are income tax implications in about every transaction.

Bill has done a lot of income tax planning involving sales and purchases of real estate and businesses, as well as the formation of new businesses. Those types of transactions can involve contract work, choosing entity types to achieve planning goals, and drafting business organization documents. 

Bill has also done planning and implementations for liquidations and dissolutions when clients are selling their businesses or assets. Bill has done income tax compliance work with both the Internal Revenue Service and the Colorado Department of Revenue. Those activities have included assisting in the preparation of income tax returns, tax return audits, and tax collection matters.

After receiving a Master of Laws Degree from the University of Denver’s Graduate Tax Program in 1979, Bill was employed by a regional certified public accounting firm in Glenwood Springs to do tax consulting and planning for its clients. Bill left that accounting firm in 1982 to take work as an attorney with an Aspen law firm and then in his own firm until 2007, when Bill merged his practice into Garfield & Hecht. Bill is Of Counsel to Garfield & Hecht and practices primarily out of the Glenwood Springs office but meets with clients in all of the offices of Garfield & Hecht.

Bill has spoken many times over the years to various groups on the subjects of taxation and estate planning.