Director of Trust and Estate Tax Services

Director of Trust and Estate Tax Services

Grand Rapids, MI

Job Opportunity: Director of Trust and Estate Tax Services

Who we are
We’re an integrated professional services firm built on the belief that meaningful impact is possible — with our clients, our team, and our communities. Guided by a fully aligned leadership team, we build that reality 90 days at a time. Our approach lets our people cultivate deeper client relationships and spread work more evenly across the year. We believe delivering more value to clients is what lets our team receive more in return through competitive compensation, real work/life harmony, strong benefits and administrative support, and development at a personally preferred pace. Work should harmonize with life, not compete with it: you can build around personal priorities, be present for the people who matter, and use your PTO without dreading the surge before or after. We spend most of our waking hours at work, so that time should matter alongside clients and teammates we genuinely enjoy.

The position
H&S Companies is hiring a Director of Trust & Estate Tax Services. This is a new position created to transform our compliance-based book of business into an elite proactive trust and estate advisory team. The book is dependable; it just stops at the return. You will deliver the existing compliance book, build industry leading advisory offerings, and recruit and lead the team that delivers both. This role is built to grow into partnership.

Your role
Your technical responsibilities build in stages, starting from the filings most firms can handle to the planning work few firms can.

• Review and deliver the existing compliance book. Trust and estate income tax
  returns, gift tax returns, estate tax returns, and each decedent’s final individual
  return. You personally review and deliver this work in your first season.
• Own relationships with estate income tax returns that use fiscal-year planning to defer tax, complex trust returns with distributions to beneficiaries, gift tax returns that report discounted values, and estate tax returns that preserve a surviving spouse’s unused exemption.
• Make distribution planning routine by reviewing every trust at year-end, and in the short window after it, so income is taxed to family members in lower brackets rather than inside the trust.
• Work directly with estate planning attorneys, wealth advisors, and other professionals to deliver integrated planning solutions and advice.
• Oversee and advise on the firm’s existing family-office engagements (bill pay, personal financial statements) alongside the account partners.

Grow practice into the work few firms can do:

• Bring fiduciary accountings in-house and tie them directly to the tax filings and keep charitable remainder trusts and unrelated business taxable income in good order.
• Coordinated returns for families with multiple trusts, including generation-skipping tracking.
• Gift disclosures detailed enough to start the IRS audit clock on discounted transfers.
• Full estate tax returns with valuation strategy, marital elections, and installment payment of the tax.
• Build the standard after-death tax playbook that supports the firm’s estate administration services: every election and deadline mapped in the first 90 days.
• Audit representation, charitable trust income tax planning, and foreign trust reporting.
• Identify high‑value advisory offerings. Then design, price, and package the services that meet those needs with support from your firm management team.
• Design the seats on your team with defined roles and responsibilities aligned to deliver an elite advisory experience.
• Hire and develop the team while you set and hold the technical bar.

Preferred qualifications

• CPA or JD; JD, LL.M. (Tax), or dual CPA/JD a strong plus.
• Fiduciary, estate, and gift tax work at the level described above.
• A track record of leadership through progressive responsibility.
• Player-coach temperament: you can personally deliver while designing what comes next.
• You enjoy developing others.
• You understand what drives value to clients and in turn long term sustainable profit and equity growth to the firm.
• Required: Share our core values of caring, authentic, client obsessed, positive attitude, self-motivated, and continuous learning.