Going through a divorce can be stressful as you need to determine who gets the children and what portion of the assets do each person get.  There are additional obstacles that some spouses go through if one spouse is hiding assets, or falsifying financial documents.  To help uncover hidden assets, you should consider hiring a forensic accountant.  When a spouse is considered a breadwinner and controls the majority of the finances, they can hide information about the value of their assets and property to prevent the other from accounting for them in the divorce. 

The forensic accountant can help you identify assets by performing property searches or combing through bank statements to look for possible payments to a secret bank account or transfers to a friend.   This process is called asset tracing, in which they follow the money and determine if one spouse is deliberately concealing assets by transferring them to other people or holding them in an account you didn’t know about.

A forensic accountant can also perform a lifestyle analysis to assist you in determining how much alimony or child support should be granted.  The forensic accountant will reconstruct income and expenses during the marriage and analyze a spouse’s ability to pay monthly support payments.  The forensic accountant will review bank statements, credit card statements and tax returns to calculate the income and expenses.

A forensic accountant can also help you determine the value of a closely held business.  The forensic accountant will perform a valuation of the business to assess its net worth.  An analysis can also be conducted to determine if one spouse has been misappropriating funds from the business or paying fictitious vendors. 

With the help of a forensic accountant you will be able to uncover any hidden financial information and get a fair and equitable portion of the marital assets.   

Gaurangkumar Patel, CPA/PFS has worked in the Forensic Accounting Department at KPMG and Blackman Kallick and has experience working on divorce cases.  You can view his experience and qualifications by clicking here.