Liz Weston

Dear Liz: My stepmother passed away in December 2006, and her executor, who was her financial planner, distributed the estate according to her trust. A while after this, I discovered that she had a life insurance policy that hadn’t been addressed. The executor pursued this and found that $80,000 was due to the three primary heirs. However, he kept saying things were “in process.” At least a couple of years later, he said he had the check but didn’t know how to proceed because the estate was settled and also the insurance company had been taken over by another company. I finally saw the actual check (in April 2016) that he had. He claims he’s pursuing this but keeps going silent on us for extended periods of time. What can we do?

Answer: One possibility is that he showed you a phony check after pocketing the money. The other possibility is that he’s stunningly incompetent. It’s not clear which option is more disturbing.

Any estate planning attorney, or financial planner who has taken an estate-planning class, could tell him that life insurance proceeds typically pass outside the probate process, which means the estate wouldn’t necessarily have to be reopened. (Even if the estate did need to be reopened, every state has procedures for doing so.)

“I would think that the executor could merely endorse the check over to the three heirs,” Los Angeles estate planning attorney Burton Mitchell said. “Or he could open an estate bank account, deposit the check, write a check to the beneficiaries and then close the account.”

At this point, of course, the check may too stale to cash, but that’s not an insurmountable problem either. The current insurer would be able to reissue the check if the assets haven’t been turned over to the state or “escheated.” If the money was escheated, the executor can file a claim with the state to get it back.

Blaming his inaction on the insurance company takeover is absurd. All he needed to do was to call the new insurer, which has all the records of the old one.

The heirs have a number of options. They can petition the probate court to order the executor to distribute the life insurance proceeds. They can hire an attorney to help them do so or to contact the executor to demand he act, or both. They also can file a complaint with the company that employs him (assuming he’s not self-employed), with the regulator that oversees him and with the entity that issued his credentials, assuming he has any.

What they shouldn’t do is wait any longer. The executor’s inaction has already cost them years of lost potential investment returns.