Accounting Time: Can a beneficiary request a pre-death accounting?

In this video, partner Keith A. Davidson discusses whether a beneficiary can obtain a pre-death accounting--meaning an accounting for the period of time when a parent was still alive.

Hi, this is Keith Davidson from Albertson & Davidson. In this video, I’m discussing pre-death accounting rights. This is a really important question and it’s one that we get all of the time. So let’s say that your parent has a revocable trust. During their lifetime, you as a child, you have no right to get an accounting. Because, as long as the trust is revocable, only the person who has the power to revoke has the power to request things like an accounting. You as the child, even though you might be a remainder beneficiary, you’ve got no right to ask for an accounting while your parent is alive. However, once your parent passes away, you might be entitled to an accounting for the period of time while the parent was alive and somebody else was acting as trustee. It really depends on the facts and circumstances of your case. So if there is some indication that the trustee might have taken assets, embezzled, mismanaged assets, something along those lines, then you can go to court and you can demand a pre-death accounting. And, in a majority of cases, the judge is going to grant that and allow you to get that pre-death accounting. Again, it has to be where the trustee is somebody other than your parent. Because, obviously, if your parent was trustee, and now they’ve passed away, they can’t do an accounting. But if it was somebody else as trustee for a period of time before your parent passed away, then you might be able to get a pre-death accounting.

But let’s talk about something that’s a little different from accountings, but very similar – and that is getting financial information. So even if you’re not able to get a pre-death accounting, per se, you might be able to get and it might be a little easier to get, the underlying financial information. And that’ll be true once you file a lawsuit of any type, really, against the trust. Because then you get subpoena power. You can go right to the bank. You can go right to the brokerage firms. And you get that information and look at it yourself and then you won’t need an accounting at all.