Siblings Question Where Their Mother's Money Went

The situation

Amalia, a line cook, and Paulo, a long-haul truck driver, lost their mother early in the year. She had lived alone in Scarborough for the last decade of her life, and in her late seventies, after a couple of falls, she had signed a power of attorney for property naming her third child, Cristina, to manage her bank accounts and pay her bills. A power of attorney for property is a document that lets someone else make financial decisions on a person's behalf while that person is still alive. It ends automatically the moment the person dies, at which point authority passes to whoever is named to administer the estate — usually the executor named in the will.

Their mother's will named all three siblings as co-executors and split the estate equally between them. Once the funeral was over, Amalia asked Cristina for a rundown of what was left. The answer was vague, and the numbers did not sit right. Their mother had owned her home outright and had modest savings; by the time she died, the estate was worth roughly $190,000. Amalia and Paulo had expected something closer to $250,000 based on conversations with their mother two years earlier, before her health declined and Cristina took over the finances.

Amalia raised it first over the phone, gently, hoping there was a simple explanation — a large medical bill, a renovation to make the home safer after the falls, something ordinary. Cristina's answers shifted each time she was asked, and she grew defensive when Paulo asked to see bank records directly. That reaction, more than any single number, was what finally pushed the two of them to ask a lawyer to look at the actual statements rather than keep guessing over the phone.

What the accounting request found

Amalia came to our firm with bank statements her mother had kept in a drawer, covering roughly the last two years before her death — the period Cristina held the power of attorney. An attorney for property is not a gift; it is a role that carries a legal duty to act in the incapable person's best interests, to keep their money separate from the attorney's own, and to keep records of what came in and what went out. That duty does not disappear just because the person has since died — it becomes something the attorney can be called on to answer for as part of settling the estate.

Our review of the statements found a pattern of e-transfers and cash withdrawals from their mother's account, totalling roughly $45,000 over the two years, that did not match any bills, medical costs, or home expenses the team could identify. Some withdrawals lined up with dates Cristina had mentioned needing help with her own rent. There was no accounting for the money, no receipts, and no loan agreement. On its own, this was not proof of wrongdoing — attorneys sometimes reimburse themselves for legitimate expenses without keeping perfect records, and a parent can also choose to gift money to one child during their lifetime. But without any record or explanation, the estate had a real question to ask, and the other two beneficiaries had every right to ask it before the estate was distributed.

What we did

1. Sent a formal request for accounts. Rather than accusing Cristina of anything, we wrote to her setting out the specific transactions in question and asking for a full accounting of her time as attorney — a structured summary of all money received and spent on their mother's behalf, with supporting records. This is a standard and expected step, not a hostile one, and it gave Cristina a fair chance to explain the withdrawals before anyone treated them as a problem.
2. Explained the alternative clearly, to keep pressure realistic. If informal accounting failed, the co-executors could apply to the Superior Court to compel a formal passing of accounts, where a court reviews the attorney's records line by line and can order repayment of anything unexplained. We were candid with Amalia and Paulo that this route is slow, often taking well over a year, and that the legal costs involved can erode the very estate they were trying to protect — a risk worth naming before anyone committed to it.
3. Reviewed Cristina's response with the family's history in mind. Cristina, through her own lawyer, accounted for about $15,000 of the withdrawals as reimbursement for driving their mother to appointments, groceries, and covering a home repair. The remaining roughly $30,000 she could not document, though she maintained their mother had told her verbally it was a gift.
4. Negotiated a repayment rather than pushing to court. Verbal gifts from an incapable or declining parent to their attorney are viewed with real suspicion under Ontario law, precisely because the arrangement is so easy to abuse and so hard to disprove after the person has died. Given that exposure, we proposed Cristina repay half of the undocumented amount — about $15,000 — into the estate, with the other half treated as settled and released, in exchange for all three siblings signing a full release and avoiding a passing of accounts entirely.
5. Documented the settlement in writing before releasing any estate funds. Every term — the repayment amount, the timeline for payment, and the mutual release of further claims among the three siblings — was put into a signed agreement before the estate distributed a dollar to anyone, so the compromise could not unravel later over a misunderstanding.

The outcome

Cristina repaid roughly $15,000 into the estate over a few months, restoring the estate to approximately $205,000 once combined with the funds already on hand. Once distributed three ways, each sibling received roughly $68,000 — less than the $250,000 estate Amalia and Paulo had once expected to split, but a fair resolution of what could actually be documented and proven, reached without a fight that would have cost all three siblings money and time, and very likely their relationship along with it.

No one walked away entirely satisfied. Amalia and Paulo still believe more money went missing than the $30,000 they could point to with the bank statements they had. Cristina maintains the money was a gift and repaid half of it only to close the matter, not because she agreed she owed it. That discomfort is the nature of a genuine compromise: it trades the possibility of winning everything in court for the certainty of resolving something now, at a cost both sides can live with, without years of formal accounting proceedings standing between three siblings and their mother's estate.

Amalia later said the hardest part was not the money but not knowing for certain what had happened in those two years. A negotiated settlement does not always answer that question fully, and we were upfront with her that it wouldn't. What it did was put a number on the uncertainty, backed by a signed release, rather than leaving it to sit unresolved between three siblings for years while a court worked through records their mother could no longer explain herself.

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