Download Denied: Isn’t the Trustee required to give me financial information?

In this video, partner Keith A. Davidson discusses bad Trustees who refuse to provide reasonable financial information for your Trust.

The following is a transcript of this video:

In this video, I want to talk about trustees who refuse to give you the financial documents that you’re entitled to as a trust beneficiary. And one of the biggest questions I get asked when I’m talking to trust beneficiaries is, isn’t the trustee required me financial information about the trust when I ask for it? And the answer is yes, of course, the trustee’s supposed to do that. If you have an interest in a trust and you want to see the trust bank statements or brokerage statements, or you want to see how much rent the trust is pulling in off of rental real property, as a beneficiary, you have a right to see that. You have a right to see all of that.
In fact, the trustee has a duty to keep you reasonably informed as a trust administration is going on without you even asking. But, more than that, the trustee has a duty to provide relevant information to you upon reasonable request. Now, what the means is that you can’t ask for information every day or every hour, but if you ask for it, you should get it within a reasonable time, which usually means within a few days or a week at the most. The problem is, bad trustees simply refuse to do it. And then, the question is, well, if they’re required to do this, why aren’t they doing it? And that’s a hard question to answer. Because, well, I don’t know, they’re just bad trustees. They don’t understand what they’re supposed to do. Or, they’re just refusing to do what they’re supposed to do. And so your answer, in order to fix that problem, is you file a petition in California Probate Court and you ask the judge to issues orders and start helping you force the trustee to act. You can also go in and try to get removal and suspension. That’s not so easy to do, but, it’s something that you can consider.
But if you’re a trust beneficiary and you’re not getting financial information from your trust, you can sit around and you can be frustrated. You can scratch your head and you can ask why isn’t the trustee doing this. But, at the end of the day, it’s going to be incumbent upon you, if you want to fix the problem, to go to court and get some help from a probate judge.