- 51 -
joint obligations, of decedent and the children. They were also
used to receive income that belonged solely to the children and
to pay obligations for which the children were solely
responsible.
Because of this commingling, the proper classification of
the thousands of transactions listed in petitioner's accounting
as "children's expenses", "joint expenses", or "decedent's
expenses" is of vital importance. The classifications presented
in petitioner's accounting were performed entirely by Donald
Hendrickson. Because the books reviewed by Donald Hendrickson
had classified the bank account items only as money coming in or
money going out, he was required to perform these
classifications, and the resulting allocations, largely on the
basis of his recollections of the purposes of the transactions.
In addition, Donald Hendrickson generally reviewed only check
registers, rather than the canceled checks. Moreover, we again
note that the accounting concerns thousands of transactions over
14 years and that Donald Hendrickson did not himself keep the
records on which the accounting is based.
For all these reasons-–and without suggesting any
dishonesty--we believe that petitioner's accounting is not
reliable enough either to establish the precise amount of
decedent's expenses paid by Garry's estate or to serve more
generally as a complete "accounting" of Garry's estate.
Page: Previous 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 NextLast modified: May 25, 2011