Pretty much every divorce client who suspects their spouse is hiding assets asks some version of the same question: “how do we find it?” Their instinct is to talk to their attorney about who to hire and what types of evidence and records to chase.
That’s a fair question, but it actually belongs further down the line. Sophisticated divorce counsel knows which experts are the best and what discovery tools are most effective at finding hidden property. The real key is that before you delve into the mechanics of how, you need to explore why and whether. You want to know what potentially finding an undisclosed asset is actually worth to you financially and emotionally, measured against what looking will cost you in terms of both time and financial investment.
Time, Money, Outcomes
To help clients make this decision, we use the same framework we use for almost every difficult decision in a divorce: time, money, and outcomes. In this context, time refers to the delay the search will likely create, in months and in your own bandwidth, including the cost of staying entangled with your spouse for longer. Money is what it will cost in legal fees and expert costs, set against what you stand to gain if you’re right about the value of the undisclosed asset. Outcomes is how likely it is that finding the asset will actually, materially change the settlement.
Understandably, because they are upset, many people skip thinking through time, money, and outcomes. They jump straight to how: who do we hire, what do we subpoena, where do we look, without first asking themselves why, and whether the answer to why justifies the time and money it will take.
I want to make sure I call out that there is an emotional overlay to time, money, and outcomes. It’s not a flaw in the framework – in fact, one of the main points of working through the time, money, and outcomes objective framework is not to strip the emotion out of the decision. It’s to let you apply it fully informed, with your eyes open. It’s entirely fine to decide that for you there is real value in knowing, once and for all, whether your spouse hid an asset . . . even if the asset itself is unlikely to be worth more than what you have to invest to find out. What we care about is what you understand about whatever trade you’re making before you make it, not afterward.
The Case for Digging
Sometimes the objective financial case for digging is very strong.
If your spouse owns a business and runs substantial cash through it, or has a history of receiving significant gifts or non-W-2 income throughout your marriage, a forensic accountant may be well worth the investment.
For example, if you were living like people with significant means, vacations, private school, a second home, and your spouse suddenly claims to be penniless for no obvious reason right before the divorce . . . we have a contradiction between a documented standard of living and a current financial story. Figuring out how you paid for that lifestyle, and whether and why anything has changed, is often worth the cost of finding out.
Note to be wary of new behavior alone. A spouse getting sketchy right before a divorce is often worth an initial investigation, but sketchy conduct doesn’t prove there’s big money behind it. If a business was marginal before things turned suspicious, it’s probably still marginal. If debt was subsidizing the family’s lifestyle for years, there’s often no hidden pot of gold.
Sometimes, it’s the subjective factors that make the case for digging. It’s perfectly valid to decide that you need to know whether your ex hid assets from you – even when you know it will likely delay the divorce and cost you more financially than the value of what you find (if anything).
There’s also a case for digging that has nothing to do with the numbers (but it should still start with the numbers). Some people choose to know, full stop, even when the theoretical financial upside won’t come close to covering the cost of finding out. That’s a perfectly reason to dig. However, before you choose that route, actually look at the time and money it will take, so your decision to proceed is made with everything in clear view. Once you’ve done that and you still want to dig, your ultimate reason doesn’t have to be financial. If not knowing would follow you into the next chapter of your life, that’s worth something real, even if it never shows up on a financial statement.
It’s Not All or Nothing
A full forensic accounting isn’t the only tool, and it’s often not the first one we reach for. If a spouse simply isn’t handing over bank statements, brokerage records, or business financials, we can often subpoena them directly from the institution holding them. This skips the spouse entirely, and in some cases tends to be faster and cheaper than the alternative, which is filing motions with the court to compel production, then waiting for a hearing date, then hoping the order actually gets complied with. Motions can take months to be heard, and the legal fees to get there add up before you’ve learned a single new fact.
A subpoena to a bank or brokerage gets you the records on the institution’s timeline, not your spouse’s. For a lot of cases, that’s enough. For some, strategic third-party depositions can help further smoke out whether there’s fire along with the smoke. For others, a private investigator can help determine whether there’s more discovery to do before making a decision.
A forensic accountant typically only becomes necessary once you have the records and need someone to make sense of complicated patterns within them, like cash flow through a business or transfers across a web of accounts.
The Case for Stopping
Let’s acknowledge that there’s a real unfairness baked into all of this. Your spouse was supposed to disclose those accounts and that income in the first place. Instead, you’re the one paying a lawyer and possibly a forensic accountant or another expert to extract information that should have just been handed over. That’s absolutely frustrating. But the reality remains that the unfairness of the way the process works and the decision whether to chase it down are two different issues. Unfortunately, in most cases, being right about who created the problem doesn’t change what it costs to solve it.
A forensic accountant costs real money, and a deep dive can run into the tens of thousands. It also takes time, and litigation that drags on for discovery fights has its own cost: legal fees and timing delays, yes. But also, there’s the emotional toll of staying entangled with someone you’re trying to leave. And at the end of it, the outcome may not even move. If the amount in dispute is $15,000 and the investigation costs $20,000, you’ve spent money to lose money — even when you’re right.
By the way, even when the financial case for digging is strong, some people decide against it anyway. Most often, this is because what they want most is to be done. For some people, getting to the other side of the divorce is more valuable than even a significant and/or likely financial upside. That is completely legitimate. We’re allowed to value our time, and getting our life back, more than money. As long as you’ve looked long and hard about what you may well be leaving on the table financially, make the trade that’s most meaningful to you.
Before You Commit
There’s a gut check worth running in both directions. Ask yourself how you’ll feel if you go all in and it turns out there’s nothing there (or what’s there isn’t worth as much as you spent figuring that outI. If you can live with that because the answer itself was what you were after, go ahead. If that outcome would leave you feeling like you wasted time and money on top of everything else, that’s worth knowing before you start.
Then run it the other way. Ask yourself how you’ll feel ten years from now if you decide not to dig, and it later turns out there was a substantial asset that never made it into the settlement. For some people, that’s a risk they can live with, especially once they’ve actually looked at the cost of finding out and decided it wasn’t worth it. For others, the thought of finding that out down the road is worse than any amount they’d spend now to rule it out. Both gut checks matter, and they don’t always point the same direction.
Most people end up in one of three places. Some decide not to dig, whether because the math doesn’t support it or because what they want most is to put it behind them and move on. Others decide to dig anyway, because they need to know, regardless of what the math says. And some take a middle course: a subpoena or a third-party deposition to get a little more information before committing to anything bigger, like a full forensic accountant. That last option lets you learn more without paying for more than you need yet, and the answer often tells you which of the other two paths you’re actually on. We’re glad to support any of these. What matters isn’t which one you choose. It’s that you choose it with your eyes open, knowing exactly what you’re paying for and why.