Forcing a Passing of Accounts After an Oshawa Estate Went Quiet

The situation

Dante drove long-haul routes out of the Oshawa area, often gone for a week or two at a stretch. His sister Zainab worked as a security guard on rotating shifts. Neither had much spare time, which is part of why, when their father died, they were relieved that his will named an old family friend, Jomar, as estate trustee rather than either of them. Jomar had known their father for decades and had helped him run a small mobile car-detailing franchise he operated part-time out of a rented unit on the east side of the city. It seemed like a sensible choice: someone who already understood the business, stepping in to wind up the estate while Dante and Zainab kept working their jobs.

The estate was modest by most standards — a bank account with a little over $60,000, and Jomar's estimate that the remaining equity in the detailing franchise, once its equipment and the balance of its franchise term were sold off, would add roughly $35,000 more. Split evenly between the two siblings under the will, it worked out to something that mattered to both of them: a dent in Dante's truck loan, a cushion for Zainab between shifts. For the first few months, Jomar sent occasional updates. Then the updates stopped.

The problem

An estate trustee's job is to collect the estate's assets, pay its debts, and eventually distribute what's left to the beneficiaries named in the will — but along the way, the trustee is expected to keep clear records of every dollar that comes in and goes out. Beneficiaries are entitled to see those records. Most trustees provide an informal accounting without much friction: a spreadsheet, receipts, a final statement before distribution.

Jomar did not. For nearly a year he kept the detailing franchise running under the estate's name rather than winding it down, telling Dante and Zainab it was more valuable as a going concern than as scrapped equipment. He paid himself an unspecified amount for the time he put into it. He used the estate's bank account to cover the franchise's ongoing fees and a lease renewal, without asking either sibling first. When Zainab finally asked for a plain accounting of what had come in and gone out, Jomar sent a two-line email with a single total and no supporting detail. Dante's follow-up calls went to voicemail.

By the time the siblings came to Treadstone Law, roughly eight months had passed since their father's death with no distribution, no itemized accounting, and a trustee who had gone from responsive to unreachable. Neither of them wanted to accuse Jomar of anything — he had been a fixture in their father's life for thirty years — but they needed to know where the money had gone, and the informal route had run out.

What we did

1. Sent a formal written demand for accounts. Before involving the court, we wrote to Jomar directly, setting out exactly what an estate trustee is required to disclose to beneficiaries and requesting a full, itemized accounting within a set period — every deposit, every expense, every draw he had taken for his own time. This step matters even when a trustee has already gone quiet: it creates a clear record that the beneficiaries asked reasonably before anyone went to court.
2. Applied to the Superior Court to compel a passing of accounts. When the deadline passed with no response, we brought an application asking the court to order Jomar to formally pass his accounts — a process where the estate trustee files a detailed accounting of the estate's finances for the court's review, and any beneficiary can object to specific entries before a judge approves or adjusts them. Compelling a passing of accounts is a serious step, but it exists precisely for situations like this one, where a trustee has stopped cooperating informally.
3. Retained a review of the franchise's records. Once Jomar was ordered to produce his accounts, we arranged for a review of the detailing franchise's financial records for the period he had kept it running under the estate. The review flagged that his time-based draws had no supporting documentation, that a lease renewal had been paid without any corresponding benefit to the estate once the business was ultimately sold, and that roughly $28,000 in outflows from the estate account had no clear estate purpose at all.
4. Negotiated a settlement before the hearing. Faced with a formal accounting he could not fully support, Jomar's own lawyer opened settlement discussions rather than proceed to a contested hearing where a judge would rule on each disputed entry. We negotiated on Dante and Zainab's behalf, using the unsupported $28,000 figure as the anchor for what Jomar owed back to the estate before any final distribution.
5. Secured a signed settlement and release before final distribution. Rather than litigate every line item to a judgment, which would have taken many more months and consumed a real share of the estate in costs on both sides, we reached a settlement in which Jomar repaid a substantial portion of the disputed amount directly to the estate, with the balance formally written off as an accepted business loss tied to the lease renewal he could not justify.

The outcome

Jomar repaid $19,000 of the roughly $28,000 in unsupported outflows, bringing the estate back close to whole. The remaining $9,000 — mostly tied to the lease renewal on premises the estate no longer needed once the detailing franchise was finally sold to a buyer for far less than its original estimate — was not recoverable. Jomar had made the decision in good faith, if without authority, and by the time the accounting caught up to him the money was already spent and the business itself had lost most of the value he'd hoped keeping it open would preserve.

Once the settlement was signed, the estate distributed what remained: instead of the roughly $47,500 each sibling had originally expected, Dante and Zainab each received closer to $43,000 once the accounting shortfall, legal costs of the application, and the final reduced sale price of the franchise were factored in. It was not the outcome either of them had hoped for when their father first passed, but it was a contained, accounted-for result rather than an open-ended loss with no resolution in sight. Acting on the missing accounting when they did — rather than continuing to wait for Jomar to come around on his own — was what stopped the shortfall from growing further while the franchise's value kept eroding.

The whole process, from the first written demand to the signed settlement, took a little over five months. Passing-of-accounts applications that go all the way to a contested hearing can take considerably longer, since the court has to work through every disputed entry; settling before that stage, once the accounting made the unsupported outflows clear, was what kept the estate's remaining assets from being consumed further by the dispute itself.

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