Is Your Spouse Hiding Assets?

 Posted on September 10, 2014 in High Asset Divorce

In many high asset divorces, one spouse will attempt to hide assets from the other spouse with the intention of denying that spouse his or her rightful share of the marital estate. However, an aggressive complex divorce attorney representing you decreases the odds of your spouse getting away with not disclosing his or her true financial worth.

There are steps that an attorney will take to uncover those hidden assets. Requesting your spouse's pay stubs, tax returns, cancelled checks, bank statements, brokerage account statements, and any other deposit accounts, as well as credit card statements, are all part of the discovery process. Those documents will be closely studied to see if there are discrepancies between what your spouse is claiming he or she has and what the documents say they have.

There are things that you can also do to see if your spouse is hiding assets. You probably know your spouse better than anyone and that knowledge could help in going over the documents that have been produced.

Look over all of the tax returns that have been produced to make sure that the interest that is being claimed from any financial accounts matches with all the accounts that your spouse has disclosed. If he or she is claiming more in interest to the IRS than what his or her disclosed accounts are showing, that could be a signal that there are other accounts somewhere.

It is also a good idea to check all the bank statements for any movement or transfers of funds that are not showing up on any other statements. That could indicate hidden bank accounts.

Pay stubs are also places that hold clues to hidden assets. Make sure what is coming in as income is matching what is being deposited in bank accounts. For example, if your spouse's monthly net income is $50,000 but there is only $10,000 being deposited each month, you need to find out where the rest of the money is going.

The same goes for your spouse's claimed expenses. If he or she is spending more each month than he or she is earning, yet bills are getting paid, where is the money coming from?

If you are considering a divorce where there will be high asset or complex property litigation, and suspect your spouse is hiding assets, make sure to hire an aggressive Williamson County complex divorce attorney to begin planning and strategizing to ensure you receive all that you are entitled to in your divorce settlement.