Discovering hidden family assets lawyers play a key role in protecting spouses and the courts from dishonesty and malfeasance. In high net worth cases, where MacLean Law set recent records for discovering missing millions and punishing non disclosing spouses with jail time and special costs awards in the millions – the stakes are even higher. Our lawyers have used creative techniques to find millions of missing cash and assets in these recent blockbuster cases including, Anton Pillar raids, Mareva Injunctions, and forensic audits as well as killer cross-examinations where lying spouses were exposed in front of the Courts. These cases made front-page news in BC and around the World.
Tal Wolf one of our skilled senior family lawyers explains how he and our other award-winning family lawyers tirelessly ferret out hidden income and family property.
When you and your spouse decided to divorce, you might have assumed you would both treat the process with honesty and transparency. Your spouse, though, may be trying to conceal your family’s full financial picture, especially if they managed your household’s finances. Similarly, if your spouse had one of more businesses that they operated largely without your involvement, family assets, debts and expenses may have been intermingled with the corporate accounts for tax purposes, convenience, or credit access – benign enough while your relationship was intact and your interests were aligned – but making it more difficult for you to discern the family property and debts that you now seek to claim (or disavow). Discovering hidden family assets lawyers help level the playing field to ensure separated spouses and their children are protected financially.
Discovering Hidden Family Assets Lawyers
1 877 602 9900
How BC Spouses Hide Family Property
Before divorce proceedings begin, you will go through a period known as discovery. During discovery, we can demand that your spouse provide disclosures, under oath, about your spouse’s finances. Discovering Hidden Family Assets Lawyers can also demand your spouse to produce certain documents, like tax returns, bank statements, and corporate financial statements. With your lawyer’s help, you can review these documents for discrepancies, or establish a more clear picture of your spouse’s true income that actually would be available for them to pay you support. Red flags including offshore income, real estate income or investment income previously unknown to you may signal that your spouse is hiding assets.
Discovering hidden family assets lawyers can also apply for a court order for 3rd party discovery, for example to any bank where you suspect your spouse has an account. When subpoenaed properly, a bank is obligated to produce all records associated with your spouse’s name. If the bank fails to do so, it can be held in contempt of court.
With account records in hand, our tenacious discovering hidden family assets lawyers can search for transactions into and out of known accounts. We can look for unfamiliar account numbers. For example, if we find a large transfer into or out of your spouse’s account, we can check to see where the money came from or went. Banks typically list the name of the sending and receiving institutions and the last four digits of all accounts. If you find an unfamiliar account, you may have discovered a hidden asset, and we can follow up with a court-sanctioned subpoena for records to that bank as well.
Speak With Our Discovering Hidden Family Assets Lawyers Lawyers 1 877 602 9900
Outside of discovery, you will want to know where to look for hidden assets on your own. Some ways that your spouse may be hiding assets – in plain sight – include:
- hiding hidden cash payments for work or asset sales ( MacLean caught a husband who drywalled a suitcase with a half million of cash behind his garage walls!)
- Delaying income, a bonus, or a promotion
- Gifting items or money to family and friends below market value and then taking them back after the proceedings are over
- Investing in cryptocurrency
- Opening a P.O. box
- Purchasing expensive items – like collectible cars or art – to convert to cash later
- Taking frequent trips to known tax havens
- putting real estate, shares, and other money in friends or associates names
Consequences for hiding assets
Generally in British Columbia, you and your spouse will receive equal shares of any family property you acquired during your marriage. The Court, therefore, will not take kindly to your spouse’s actions if they have attempted to hide these from you. Consequences can range from perjury charges if your spouse has lied under oath, fines, payment of your lawyer’s fees wasted in having to uncover or deal with the evasion, and often most importantly, reapportionment of the known assets to compensate you quickly and effectively for any continued obfuscation by your spouse. Our wins in this error have discovered millions of hidden cash, assets, and income and led to jail time for the non-disclosing spouses as well as special costs orders of $1.5 million in one case and over $1 million in another in the last two years.
The Vancouver Family Property Lawyers at MacLean Law will help you both to track down assets that can be found and to get compensated if we can show a likelihood that the full family financial picture is not being accounted for by your spouse.
Call MacLean Family Law at 1 877 602 9900 now. Don’t wait and give your spouse more time to transfer assets out of reach, or to make them harder to find!
