If You Should be Called On to Act as Executor or Executrix, You Must Exercise Care and Caution

Most likely you will require several original copies of the Death Certificate in order to settle all of the affairs. This one document contains more information about that person than almost any other document, to include date of birth, Social Security Number and much more. A Death Certificate should only be turned over to a person or institution with a real need for the document.

In most of the United States, death certificates are considered public domain documents and can therefore be obtained for any individual regardless of the requester’s relationship to the deceased. Other jurisdictions take a different view, and restrict the issue of certificates or redact certain information. For example, in the State of New York, death certificates are only obtainable by close relatives, including the spouse, parent, child or sibling of the deceased, and other persons who have a documented lawful right or claim, documented medical need, or a New York State Court Order (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_certificate).

Past scandals have surfaced in which dead people continued to receive public benefits or voted in elections.

If the decedent had been filing income tax returns or if the decedent has a filing requirement for the portion of the year in which they died, it is the responsibility of the Executor to file the final tax return and any prior year unfiled returns. For elderly decedents who had not filed tax returns in the recent past, we suggest that the Executor file the tax returns anyway. This will accomplish two major goals: 1) The address used on the returns will cause any possible future correspondence from the Internal Revenue Service to come to the new address and 2) Any potential problems will be quickly discovered and it will prevent possible future problems.

Filing an income tax return, even if it has zeros on it, will notify the IRS of the death of that taxpayer. It is important to note that initial requests for refunds can still be made, even after death as long as the statute of limitations are open. Prior years returns can be amended even after death.

The last thing any Executor or Executrix wants or needs, is to receive a tax notice from the IRS saying the Estate owes back taxes, after all of the money has been distributed to heirs. And although most Identity Theft issues can eventually be resolved, it will be very time consuming and costly.

As bad as it is to say, many cases of “Identity Theft Involving Decedents” have been found to be perpetrated by a close family member, distant relative or acquaintance.

Writing a short “DO NOT ISSUE CREDIT” request to the three major credit reporting agencies, Experian, Equifax and TransUnion is always a good precaution. Note: you will have to provide a death certificate.

If you think any of this is being overly cautious, consider this. Each year the identities of 2.5 million deceased Americans are used to open credit card accounts, apply for loans, get cellphones or other services according to fraud prevention firm ID Analytics.

Nearly 800,000 of those deceased are deliberately targeted, that is about 2,200 per day!

The balance are cases where the scammer made up a Social Security Number that just happened to match that of someone who had died (source: http://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-03-2013/protecting-the-dead-from-identity-theft.html).