MHNA provides and promotes solutions to inheritance crime, with the ultimate object in every case of assisting prudent heirs to get in their full due inheritance, in all its simplicity or complexity, efficiently, effectively and cost-effectively, without being defrauded and lied to by anyone on anything at any stage, including by their own lawyers.
Depending, of course, on when we are brought in, MHNA is available to deter, prevent, detect, expose and pursue inheritance-related dishonesty and criminality.
We look at the full range of possible, potential, probable, prospective, incipient, developing and (if we are hired too late) accomplished before- and after-death inheritance crime by old and new family, 'friends', professional financial advisers, asset managers, executors, administrators, trustees, lawyers, heirs, judges, regulators, estate front-office opponents, healthcare practitioners, caregivers, guardians, power-attorneys and others.
No-one is above or beyond our suspicion.
customers
MHNA inheritance crime-fighting services are available direct to testators, aspirant heirs, expectant heirs, disappointed heirs, heirs-in-waiting, executors, administrators, civil lawyers, criminal lawyers, police, prosecutors, accountants, auditors, tax authorities and appropriate others at all stages of any inheritance process.
foci
MHNA deals with the full range of inheritance-related general, technical, financial and other dysfunction, malfunction, misconduct, dishonesty and criminality in relation to (among others) wills, codicils, intestacy, succession, estate management, mental capacity, elder abuse, inter-family dysfunction, disinheritance etc. These are usually simple crimes that have nothing to do with inheritance law.
services
At all stages of the before- and after-death inheritance process, MHNA provides, discreetly and confidentially, the full range of advisory, consulting, supervisory, data, support and other services. We can handle cases involving any type of estate asset including cash, securities, art, antiques, marine vessels, private airplanes, realty, intellectual property etc., and any type of testator unfinished front-office business.
jurisdictions
MHNA deals with dysfunction, dishonesty and criminality in common-law and civil-law jurisdictions: we consider inheritance crime to be largely generic wherever committed. MHNA is at home internationally and multi-nationally across multiple jurisdictions. MHNA is a global business.
Depending, of course, on when we are brought in, MHNA is available to deter, prevent, detect, expose and pursue inheritance-related dishonesty and criminality.
prevention
MHNA puts systems in place, in various quarters, to thwart — including by dissuasion and deterrence — the inheritance criminal wherever she may lurk. We focus on incessant minute-by-minute real-time vigilance on every relevant estate movement, datum and cent, and on all relevant parties individually, in combination and collectively.
detection
MHNA is intimately familiar — in a way that many lawyers, police and prosecutors are not — with inheritance situations and how inheritance-related crime can be conceived, configured, committed, concealed and consummated. We are on the look-out. We treat every estate as a crime scene.
exposure
MHNA takes all available present and known-absent data and astorises them: pixel-level inspection, examination, analysis, evaluation, quantification, valuation and exposition. We prepare reports and accounts, marshal evidence, make presentations and proactively advocate.
pursuit
Civil court, criminal court… Wherever the victim wishes to go with it, MHNA will ensure that he is in a position to make a fully informed decision about the realities of the case, and implement that decision to its conclusion. MHNA informs, advises and assists throughout, liaising as appropriate with other professionals.
MHNA provides a comprehensive range of consulting, technical, forensic and other services, on a comprehensive range of subjects, in a comprehensive range of jurisdictions, particularly for:-
heirs
estate fiduciaries
law enforcement.
Preventing, detecting, exposing and pursuing inheritance-related dysfunction and dishonesty. Protecting your interests generally and specifically before, during and after inheritance dysfunction and misconduct
MHNA puts systems in place, in various quarters, to dissuade and deter the inheritance criminal wherever she may lurk. We focus on incessant minute-by-minute real-time vigilance on every estate movement and every estate cent, and on all relevant parties individually, in combination and collectively.
With whom are you dealing in the first place? Deep due diligence on estate fiduciaries and other persons of interest (eg other heirs, lawyers, accountants, etc)
Your own records, procedures, interests: are you proactively diligent and vigilant about your inheritance or do you need someone to handle the technicalia?
Helping you to deal honestly, correctly, timeously, properly and thoroughly with your fiduciary responsibilities to honest heirs
What's your set-up in the first place, including your suitability and qualifications to deal with this particular estate and its business?
Have you got yourself into trouble by lying your way into office, and then digging a hole for yourself by messing it all up — and are now into bluffing, bluster and bullshit, trying to stay out of court? Are you lying to your malpractice insurers and to your firm colleagues? Do you have multiple sets of documents, books and accounts for different scams?
MHNA will perform a deep audit of your systems, processes, functions, activities, inactivity, relationships and transactions to try to promote honesty, transparency, efficiency, economy, effectiveness and the joy, relief and self-protection of genuinely full whole-truth full-context disclosure of every relevant pixel.
Assistance in specific estate business, especially where you are out of your depth.
Assistance in identifying and dealing with criminal front-office opponents.
Enabling you to discharge your duty to protect the public and to pursue criminality, however technical and unfamiliar to you
MHNA recognises that police and prosecutors will not always have the training, resources, expertise and experience needed to respond fully, properly, correctly, timeously or at all to a distress call from a victim heir or his real-deal lawyer.
We especially recognise the difficulties in inexpert, inexperienced, unresourced, unsupported law enforcement personnel taking on an intricate inheritance crime scene involving lawyer suspects, law firm suspects, high-value vulnerable estates, wealthy heirs, criminal gangs and elaborate multi-jurisdictional financial crime.
MHNA offers the full range of customised advanced training and infrastructure set-up assistance, plus, in specific cases, support, advice, examination, analysis, evaluation, elucidation, reporting, drafting, evidentiary, presentation and data services.
We will save you time, effort and resources by assisting you at every stage, all the way from suspicion to verdict. No more "It's a civil matter."
At one or more points during a testator's life and during the management of the after-death estate, an unassuming heir's thoughts, instincts and suspicions might turn to actual, prospective, potential, probable, possible inheritance-related criminality by one or more people in the mix: family, 'friends', the family lawyer, the family accountant, family financial advisers. family asset managers, bankers, heirs, estate fiduciaries: all the usual inner-circle suspects, among others (it's usually an inside job).
With MHNA in the room, you will know what you're dealing with. We process and deliver hard facts and figures. We simulate, model, cost and consider how to proceed effectively and cost-effectively.
Informed, you can then choose to ignore / minimise / marginalise / trivialise the dishonesty and criminality or pursue it, by the civil route and or the criminal route.
In our experience, a vexed innocent unaided heir's crusade can start and end badly (compounding, and diverting attention and resources from, the underlying problem):-
an exasperating pointless visit to an ineffectual, naïve civil lawyer who dismisses it — or even worse, to a barking, growling, dogmatic, pompous nuisance of a civil lawyer who pretends to get it and then messes it up. We have seen this with self-professedly 'expert' lawyers (in our experience, specialist inheritance lawyers lie to their own customers compulsively about their own expertise, quickly become out of their depth, and keep digging until fired)
repeated visits to the local 'expert' — perhaps, in a civil-law jurisdiction, a local notary — who pronounces your case to be unprecedented, 'complicated' and 'difficult' and an expeditious, efficient, economical resolution 'impossible', and fails to come up with intelligible answers to elementary straightforward questions
a lame expensive doomed application, prepared, compromised and sabotaged by your own 'expert' lawyer, for an interim order to a culturally corrupt chancery / probate / civil judge who doesn't get it. We have seen this with self-professedly effective chancery litigators (whether or not they also collude criminally with the opposition)
a misadventure in the criminal law system with inexperienced criminal lawyers and unsophisticated (and apparently corrupt) regulators, police and prosecutors who have no genuine grasp of the dynamics and peculiarities of inheritance-related crime generally or your case particularly, and comprehensively give up or mess it up.
Brought in early enough, MHNA is available to help avoid — including by intervening in — these and similar misfortunes. (And inheritance aside, MHNA does not hesitate to call out lawyer dysfunction, malpractice, corruption, dishonesty and criminality wherever we see it.)
Brought in late, MHNA will take the situation apart.
MHNA is also available to provide assistance at any level, of any degree of visibility, to:-
civil lawyers practising in the field of inheritance-related civil misconduct, including the civil counterparts of relevant criminal offenses
criminal lawyers practising in the field of inheritance-related crime.
Helping you navigate the civil minutiae of a particular inheritance-related case of dysfunction, dishonesty and criminality
MHNA handles civil counterparts of criminal offenses such as (generically: the technical name will vary by jurisdiction) civil fraud, deceit, civil conspiracy, fraudulent non-disclosure, fraudulent misrepresentation, etc.
MHNA is available to coach and train partner-level civil lawyers in the fine art of identifying and nailing inheritance dishonesty and criminality in the civil context including pre-litigation, chancery court, probate court, defamation court, arbitration, mediation, conciliation etc.
Our services include:-
ascertaining and quantifiying actionable loss and damage
investigations, examinations and data services
reports, complaints, pleadings, presentations
data management: logs, archives, accounts and shadow accounts
process and work-product management, ensuring you have the pertinent facts, recognise their character and significance, and process them correctly and thoroughly into usable work product
private investigations and special projects
verification, location and recovery of estate current and contingent assets
authentication and quantification of alleged estate liabilities
micro-scrutiny, supervision, monitoring, examining, reporting on:-
estate business (inner office, back office, front office, recourse etc)
estate funds and spending
disclosed, concealed, fabricated and falsified estate data
estate books, accounts and records
relevant situations, relationships, transactions.
Helping you navigate the criminal minutiae of a particular inheritance-related criminal case
MHNA handles all inheritance-related criminal offenses in any jurisdiction (dishonesty and criminality are basically generic).
MHNA is available to coach and train partner-level criminal lawyers in the fine art of identifying and nailing inheritance dishonesty and criminality throughout the criminal justice process.
Our services include:-
ascertaining and quantifying relevant loss and damage
investigations, examinations and data services
reports, presentations, draft indictments and complaints, evidence packs; trial simulation, modelling and preparation; trial dashboards and scorecards; multi-dimensional dynamic cross-examination modules
data management: logs, archives, accounts and shadow accounts
process and work-product management, ensuring you have the pertinent facts, recognise their character and significance, and process them correctly and thoroughly into usable work product
private investigations and special projects
verification, location and recovery of estate current and contingent assets
authentication and quantification of alleged estate liabilities
micro-scrutiny, supervision, monitoring, examining, reporting on:-
estate business (inner office, back office, front office, recourse etc)
estate funds and spending
disclosed, concealed, fabricated and falsified estate data
estate books, accounts and records
relevant situations, relationships, transactions.
MHNA is available to provide assistance at any level, of any degree of visibility, to:-
bookkeepers, accountants and auditors dealing with inheritance-related financial and other data. Inheritance crime is nothing if not financial, and often heavily dependent, if not reliant, on false books and accounts. Some naïve form-filling, box-ticking rote accountants unquestioningly prepare and produce — for money — materially misleading, incomplete, false formal official interim and final financial statements, for consumption by heirs, courts, tax authorities etc., in the absence of authenticated legitimate primary source material and in the plain-view presence of an unmistakable underlying inheritance crime scene
tax authorities dealing with criminal tax filings and tax-relevant inheritance crime. The problem is not only in estate and inheritance taxes, but also in capital taxes of estate property and the personal income taxes of both individual inheritance criminals and their business operations. Tax authorities, like accountants and auditors, are easily fooled by false data appropriately disguised.
Comprehensive assistance in a disorderly field
MHNA takes a particular interest in the inheritance-related dysfunction of the financial data community. Szrabe's book on accounting and auditing in inheritance crime (see the bottom of this webpage) will set out in detail the extent of the problem.
Estate accountants: Technically competent estate accounting and accounts is a highly specialist under-populated field. Some accountants prepare draft and final estate-manager financial statements:-
from partial, degraded, corrupted, falsified figures concocted and furnished by criminal estate managers
without correlation to verified, authenticated, validated, evaluated legitimate primary source material
without correlation to the underlying character and nature of the underlying situation (which might be criminal)
— thus materially contributing to the successful conception, commission, completion and consummation of comprehensive inheritance crime. Such naïveté and ineptitude, and the pretense of procuring, processing and producing honest data, are patently dishonest, and easily classified in the right hands as multiple primary and secondary criminality. How can a compliant complicit accountant's set of dud estate accounts — the very foundation, embodiment and reflection of estate management criminality — not be, at the least, criminal collusion, criminal non-disclosure, criminal misrepresentation, criminal abuse of position and criminal false accounting? The cornered culpable accountant pleads, "We had no clue about what we were being fed by the estate manager." Indeed.
MHNA can help you recognise flagrant inheritance crime happening right in front of you to which the criminal estate manager is inviting you to become, all too easily, a prominent accomplice and co-principal.
But even better, MHNA strongly advises accountants without demonstrable relevant expertise and experience (we have no idea how that can be swiftly acquired) to have nothing at all in the first place to do with estates, including estate managers, estate books, estate accounts, estate tax filings, estate primary source material and underlying estate data.
Forensic fiduciary estate auditors: Forensic fiduciary auditing of inheritance-related financial transactions is an undeveloped highly specialised field. The notion of an audit of estate accounts, primary source material and underlying relationships and transactions is somewhat unfamiliar.
MHNA is available to train and direct auditors in the right directions. With MHNA, you will know what to look for and what you are looking at. You will be able to prepare and produce, on the instructions of victimised heirs and relevant others, deep-detail, multi-dimensional eviscerations of estate books, accounts, primary source material and relevant underlying data.
Consulting on tax-relevant inheritance crime scenes
Inheritance crime often involves criminality in relation to inventory-specific, asset-specific tax liabilities. Criminal estate management in a particular case might include:-
criminal tax inventories
criminal tax numbers
criminal tax filings
elaborate false narratives
elaborate false trails involving bookkeepers, accountants, auditors, banks, asset managers, phoney buyers and sellers, hidden and camouflaged before-death and after-death assets, concocted liabilities, complicit heirs etc.
forgery, falsification, fabrication of data
concealment and falsification of relevant relationships and transactions, especially involving lawyers
criminality by specialist tax lawyers colluding with criminal estate managers
multiply comprehensively false primary source material and a criminal concoction of the underlying situation.
MHNA will graphically elucidate for you the inheritance crime scene in its discrete components and holistically.
MHNA provides a broad palette of services suited to the occasion, juncture and circumstances.
If brought in at the outset, MHNA's role could be confined to discretely supervising, scrutinising, consulting, commenting, advising in the background, etc.
If brought in when an inheritance crime scene has become dire — eg when an enboldened criminal estate manager and her lawyers have passed a certain point of no return, judging the criminal route safer, easier and more lucrative than being honest — MHNA will have a different part to play, including complex data-intensive investigations, analyses, examinations and reports, presentations to police and prosecutors (who like slam-dunk cases brought to them on a plate), the recovery of stolen assets, assistance in civil and criminal court, special projects, and other services.
MHNA is available to assist at any and every stage of any inheritance process, such as:-
before death
after death
before any inkling or suspicion of criminality
at the suspicion stage
when inauspicious has turned to ominous
when there is or has been frank unmistakable criminality
before, during and after criminal applications by criminal estate managers to chancery / probate court
before, during and after the criminal estate manager's criminal conduct of estate front-office business, including collusion involving the criminal estate manager, criminal co-heirs, criminal front-office opponents and everyone's lawyers. (Not far-fetched: we've seen it.)
MHNA is alive to the various possibilities and opportunities for inheritance crime before the death of the testator ('testator' for the moment includes someone who has not yet made a final will as well as someone who has made a final will'. 'Will' includes codicils). MHNA's foci at this stage include (to take just a few examples):-
the expectant heir who has been or is about to be disinherited and smells something
the expectant heir likely to stay in the will who legitimately expects to inherit something
a will that appoints a lawyer as executor (MHNA trenchantly discourages this in all cases)
the disrupted and or dysfunctional family: a new spouse, the traded-in spouse, prodigal children, destroyed relationships, long-lost connections etc
the fate of particular assets eg cash in bank accounts, valuable objects etc, especially if given away before death, not insured etc
material undue influence over the testator, in any relevant way, by 'friends', family, lawyers, accountants, healthcare providers, care home staff etc
criminal draining and dissipation of the proto-estate before death
forgery, fabrication, falsification of the will, other data
kidnapping of the testator, especially if of impaired mental and or physical capacity
criminally obtained and utilised powers of attorney, bank signing mandates
other impeachable documents, relationships, transactions
MHNA has wide experience of the calamities and disasters that can befall an estate, and vulnerable innocent heirs, after death (including behavior that would have mortified the testator had he apprehended or known of any of it). MHNA's foci at this stage include (to take just a few examples):-
actual or pretended discovery of a previous or lost will
bogus will challenges, especially if encouraged by hearse-chasing lawyers
dishonest corrupt attacks on the executor, including court applications to remove him, including by front-office opponents
criminal solicitation, especally by a dishonest lawyer, of court appointment as ad col grantee, interim and or final administrator, etc
dishonest discarding by a criminal estate manager of testator-trusted advisers, lawyers etc, especially if unique repositories of data essential to the proper conduct of the estate's front-office business
patent criminality in any, some or all of the estate's general, technical, commercial and or financial management. This alludes to a universe of inner-office, back-office, front-office and recourse criminality by a universe of perpetrators including gangs of lawyers, gangs of heirs, colluding gangs, etc: Richard J. Szrabe's forthcoming book, Inheritance Crime — A Manual for Heirs and Law Enforcement is a technical mini-encyclopedia on the subject)