Are your affairs in order? It’s the question we probate and will drafting lawyers like to ask clients. However, one affair that we have to get used to is the Statement of Affairs. I had a good chat with Mark Bradshaw of the Revenue during the week, who appears to be the main guy for everything in this area. You probably have seen him on a few presentations. I was having a perennial problem in that the probate office couldn’t see my wills, even though I had put them up on the system. It appears that the fix was quite simple. I was naming my pdfs of the wills too long and I had commas in the will name. This was throwing the system out. So I was naming my wills “Last and will and testament, of Francis Murphy obit 18 Dec 2020 late of Main St.” or something to that effect. So, keep your will titles short. Something like “Will of M Jones” or words to that effect.

Another issue that appears to be happening relates to edits of the Statement of Affairs. If you have already submitted your Statement of Affairs but then afterwards make an edit, this can have the effecting of knocking it out of the system. So in these cases if you make an edit, make sure you re-submit. It seems that after editing some practitioners are not re-submitting. This means that the probate office cannot see your Statement of Affairs.

Finally he mentioned to me that there still appears to be a recurring problem in relation to joint accounts. In some cases the joint beneficiary is coming up blank on the system. It seems that when they do an upgrade, it has the effect of knocking out another element of the system. So this is a new problem, which arose out of uploading a patch to fix other problems! If you come across this issue, make contact with the National CAT helpline to walk you through the issue.