Family Law

Family law forensic accounting involves many complex personal and financial issues. It is an area that requires highly committed and experienced experts who understand the accounting and legal intricacies in this very specific area of the law. The powerful combination of our partners, staff and back-office resources gives us the capacity to handle matters of all sizes and complexity.

Discovery
We assist counsel and clients in the preparation of Preliminary and Final Declarations of Disclosure, document requests and productions, processing, inventorying, and reconciling documents received and outstanding, providing input regarding other formal discovery (Request for Admissions, Special Interrogatories, etc.), and preparation for depositions of experts and other parties. Our paperless case management software allows simultaneous access and search functionalities to our digital document files by our staff, our clients and counsel via a highly secure remote access portal.

Spousal & Child Support
Almost every family law matter has elements of support within its scope that entails preparation of declarations, reports, exhibits and/or live testimony. Issues of support include sources and taxability of income, gross cash flow, guideline support calculations, determination of the marital standard of living of the parties, and/or reasonable needs analyses for children with “high earner” parents.

Apportionment of Assets
It is a common occurrence for married people to commingle assets they acquired prior to marriage with property acquired during the marriage. The process of determining and quantifying the separate and community property components of assets is known as apportionment. Any real, personal or intangible property may be apportioned between community and separate property interests.

Business Valuation
We frequently value professional practices and other business interests for marital dissolution purposes. We translate the complex technical and legal aspects of business valuation and economic analysis into reports and analyses that are understandable and defensible upon audit or in court. We pride ourselves on the integrity of our research and our ability to provide clients with a clear understanding of the theories and techniques we employ. Our partners and staff include personnel with advanced degrees in finance, accounting and economics, as well as professional designations from the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute (CFA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) designated as Accredited in Business Valuation (ABV).

Tracing of Accounts
Gursey | Schneider LLP is regarded as the industry leader in complex tracings to determine community and separate property interests in commingled bank, investment, and/or retirement accounts. Couples frequently combine their separate property trust assets, inheritances, pre-marital property and real estate income with earned income during marriage and other community property. In most cases, if records are available, Gursey | Schneider LLP can trace each account’s deposits and disbursements to or from their sources, thereby “untangling” the commingled funds. In particular, the object of tracing is to segregate the account holdings (cash, stocks, bonds, etc.) into separate and community property components.

Our large and well-trained staff have the ability to process massive complex tracing assignments. We have successfully performed tracings of more than 20 years in duration and with more than 10,000 transactions within them. All of this has been possible as a result of our proprietarily developed tracing software, Ceres©, which allows concurrent processing of thousands of transactions in multiple accounts, followed by quick output of published reports and results. The strongest feature of Ceres© is its ability to trace margined investment accounts by tracking the marginability of each stock or bond with the application of daily stock exchange closing prices. Simply put, our tracing solution has no accounting industry peer.

Property Division and Reimbursement Analyses

In addition to the other services we provide counsel and our clients, we assist in preparing community and separate property balance sheets with proposed division of assets in order to determine the ultimate equalization payment due from one spouse to the other to equalize the community property division. This includes the preparation of detailed post-separation accountings and other reimbursement claim analyses including the quantification of potential Watts charges and Epstein credits.

Expert Witness Testimony
Our findings and conclusions frequently require oral testimony in deposition and trials. As one of the largest family law accounting practices, we have specific accreditation as experts in this area, are familiar with the various court personnel, the requirements and skills of testimony and all the experience needed for the most complex family law proceedings.