What Do I Do If My Spouse is Hiding Assets During Divorce?

After the complaint for divorce, an answer has been filed on all of the parties, the next step in a divorce is to begin the financial disclosure process. This process can be very time consuming and one of the major issues or concerns that a lot of people have are hiding marital assets.

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After complaints and answers have been submitted and filed. All parties will begin completing a verified financial information form. This is a sworn statement disclosing all financial assets that the parties have. It's difficult or impossible to settle a case or negotiate a division of the marital assets without a clear picture of what the assets are in the marriage. By completing the financial disclosure documents, both parties will have an idea of what the other party has as assets or what they have gained during the marriage. If you have concerns that your spouse is hiding assets, now is the time to bring it up.

You can bring it up to the attorney right away. Let us know. Hey, these are some of the things that I've noticed. Some red flags that you're going to want to look for are changes in deposit amounts from paychecks.

Changes in deposit locations. Perhaps you and your spouse have a joint banking account and your spouse's paychecks are no longer being deposited there. You can also look to any travel that is that is taking place without explanation for how it was paid for. You may see that there are unusual withdraws from the bank accounts. Unusual cash withdrawals. That's another sign that you can look for. We are able to, through financial disclosures, identify the assets that may have that may have been moved or are potentially being hidden.

Other things that you can look for are financial statements coming from financial institutions that you are not familiar with places, financial institutions that you, neither you nor your spouse currently bank with any retirement statements coming that you perhaps didn't previously know about.

Those are all ways to find any potentially hidden assets. It's also important that you, as our client, are ensuring that you are disclosing all of your assets as well. There can be serious ramifications for failing to disclose assets once it's time to settle all of the issues and enter your judgment of divorce.

The law in Michigan does allow provisions of the divorce to be reviewed based on fraudulent statements and a lack of disclosure of financial marital assets in order to avoid having your judgment of divorce reviewed by the court on a later date.

It's important that you and your spouse have provided specific and complete financial information.