How Do You Force a Trustee to Give you Information and Your Rightful Trust Distribution?

**Video Transcription**

Almost every day, we’re contacted by trust beneficiaries who have two big problems. These are people who are, in fact, named as beneficiaries in a trust and yet the trustee is not performing their required duties.

The number one problem people have is lack of information. You may have a trustee who’s not telling you the finances of the trust. They’re not letting you know what’s happening with the trust money or the trust investments. If you have rental income like a rental piece of property - maybe they’re not telling you how much they’re collecting in rents, what they’re using to pay expenses. Where’s the rest of the rent monies’ going that not used on building expenses.

All of these questions are reasonable for a beneficiary to ask a trustee. In fact, this is reasonable information that a trustee’s supposed to provide to the beneficiary without even being asked. But if the beneficiary asks for it, they definitely should be providing it. And yet there’s tons of people out there who are simply in the dark. They’re trust beneficiaries and they just know nothing about the trust management or administration. That’s a big problem.

The second big problem that beneficiaries have is not getting the distributions that they’re supposed to get under the trust document. And that’s where you have a trustee who just simply refuses to make a distribution. The trustee might also refuse to even find out well what are your needs as a beneficiary? What type of distribution do you need? Or does your trust require an outright distribution? Meaning, you're just supposed to get the assets of the trust and there are no standards that the trustee has to look at. All they have to do is give you your share of the trust – and they won’t do it!

I cannot tell you how often we get calls from beneficiaries who are (#1) in the dark and (#2) they’re not getting what they’re supposed to be getting out of the trust.

If you’re in that situation, you have got to take action. And what you do is you hire a firm like ours. We file in court. And the first thing we’re going to do is ask a judge to order the trustee to give you reasonable information and we’re also going to issue subpoenas out to the banks, to the financial brokers, to the property managers, and we’re going to get the information about the trust finances directly from the source, so that way, we don’t have to don’t rely on the trustee giving us anything. But the trustee’s going to give us information, too.

And then, number two, we’re going to ask the judge to order the trustee to make a proper distribution and that might include having to sell assets so that you can get your share of the value of those assets. Or, ordering the trustee to force somebody to buy somebody else out, if one beneficiary wants to keep a property and somebody else just wants to be cashed out.

All of these issues can be handled with the help of a judge. But you got to go to court. You’ve got to take that step. And you’ve got to stand up for your rights and go enforce your rights – in probate court. That’s what it’s there for. Probate court is the venue where a judge can help you sort out your trust problems.