Elderly private clients, accountants and private client practitioners

I have been with this firm for 25 years and now head up the private client and charity sections. I am a chartered accountant and also have a diploma in charity accounting. It’s mainly through my general accounting work, particularly my tax work, that I have developed my knowledge of, and interest in, elderly private client work.

Because we have regular contact with our clients – at least once a year for accounts, tax returns, and so on – we get to know them and their families, and they get to know us. In particular, we notice that as some of the clients get older they begin to depend on us because we are independent of the family and they are happy for us to be involved in their affairs and undertake tax/financial matters and so on. They bring us into the family circle as something of a trustworthy ‘friend’.

Many clients have no family or immediate family; they rely on you and trust you. I’ve had one elderly client confide everything in me rather than her family, which is nice but rather embarrassing when she then passes on and the family say, ‘well why did she not tell us this?’ and I can’t say, ‘because she didn’t want you to know’!

The next generation have got to know us through our experience with their parents or grandparents, and they then come to us for their general accounting services. We can then start making them think seriously about their long-term future – wills, tax planning issues, for example, before they reach retirement age, and also the repercussions of passing on wealth through the family. On many occasions, the family wishes they had come to us sooner before their parent(s) got really elderly, but we can at least remedy the situation.

We regularly visit the elderly clients and are very much a ‘hand holding’ service, for example, sifting through past tax papers and disposing of them for the client (as some clients do panic at the sight of papers), or checking their bank accounts to make sure they are as balanced as they believe. Many clients then keep any papers that concern them for our next visit so that we can deal with them. You also become a confidant and, a lot of the time, all the client really wants to do is talk.

Due to that involvement, we become very close to our clients, and the next logical step is to assist with finances, and then power of attorney and executorship work.

We are finding that we are doing a lot of power of attorney and executor work due to the nature of the client relationship. Normally, we work along side the appointed solicitor and it harmonises well. For instance, I had a client die at the end of last year and I had a power of attorney lodged with the solicitor. I therefore said ‘look, I have all the financial paperwork here, I will notify everybody about the death, advise on balances, realise the assets and you do all the correspondence on the will and advising beneficiaries’. I then passed across to the solicitor the funds that needed distributing. I know that some solicitors don’t have the financial skills or training to deal with that nitty-gritty type of work, so there is quite a good share of work to balance between us.

With regards to probate, I deal with day-to-day matters, contact the banks about the deaths, get all the valuations and prepare the figures for probate. The solicitors contact all the beneficiaries, dealing with all the legalities, the will, and then go for probate. Once it’s obtained we will close everything down, realise all the assets, bank all the money and pass the funds across to the solicitors who then issue the cheques and further correspond with the beneficiaries. It’s quite a fair and helpful split of duties.

We are disadvantaged, however, in that we cannot obtain probate by post, so we use the services of solicitors as it’s the simplest route to go.

We link up with solicitors; we have to, but we also want to. And they also like to use us. Certainly, I know solicitors use us for the preparation of estate accounts because we have computerised estate accounts packages. We’ve invested time and energy into those and we do have solicitors come to us just for the preparation of estate accounts. Often this is because they are perhaps small or sole practitioners who don’t have the time or inclination to invest in systems, but they do a lot of the probate work and they therefore come to us to close it down.

We deal with many younger clients, and as they get older they turn to you for all their matters. It is up to you to decide what you can and cannot take on – we do know our limits. We have drafted very simple wills from time-to-time, but where the client doesn’t have a solicitor then we usually recommend one, arrange a home visit and ensure we find the appropriate solicitor suited to the client. The solicitor then takes the instructions, although we often prepare a letter for the client detailing what we believe his/her wishes are that is then sent to the solicitor to give them a spring board from which to work.

Some of the wills that the clients request are so complicated that when a solicitor comes in cold I know the client can become very frustrated. I’ve had instances where I’ve written to the client saying, “you’ve told me X, Y and Z – is this what you really want to do to your will?” They then come back either agreeing or saying ‘I’d rather have W as well’. So I encourage them to think very carefully about it and agree on a final draft that I can then put to the solicitor who will take final instructions. This cuts out a lot of the frustration on the part of the client and makes for swifter work by the solicitor. It’s just an example of how we can work well together.

In another example, I see a client who was referred to me by her solicitor. She hasn’t seen her solicitor for 20 years and I know she needs to rewrite her will. Every time I see her I raise it gently; all I want to do is to get her to read it, think about it again and summarise her intentions, so that we have something to send to the solicitors. I know she will never pick up the phone and go to the solicitor because she hasn’t seen her in years.

Since I’m seeing her fairly regularly in monthly meetings or picking up tax matters at the end of the tax year, I know that I can pick up the conversation from four weeks ago and one day, hopefully soon, I am sure she will show me her will and I can say look it is out of date and this person has died and what about the other nieces and nephews you’ve got, for example. And one day it will register with her and she will trust me enough to talk to me about it. I know that solicitors frown on us getting involved but we’d only do it if it was simple and to continue the momentum because we already have an established relationship with the client.

Other times, I find that clients look to me and say ‘well, you tell me Andrew’. For instance, I have one elderly gentlemen who has got a problem over his leasehold and I said we just had to go back to the solicitors on this one and take their advice because he needed to secure the long-term benefit of the lease and I could not do that for him… but the solicitor could.

We can nudge clients more and more to solicitors because we do have that contact with them. For example, I was with a client the other day and she had an unsecured loan. I told her she needed to get security, it was worth paying the legal fees to know the loan is secure in the estate.

Many clients just want to look after their own affairs and do not trust the thought of others taking over and we can help nudge clients in the right direction and take away some of the scary part.

Most accountants do a lot of hand holding for their elderly clients. The clients can be very protective towards members of their family knowing their affairs and they see that you can be a neutral party.

Because we have a regular involvement in their life, the clients get to know you – there’s no shock tactics. To make an appointment to discuss litigation, for example, can be worrying, and to think about a will makes clients acknowledge their own finality and mortality – that’s something many elderly clients are wary or apprehensive about.

We seem to take away some of the client’s worries in communicating things to other professionals. Sometimes the client will ask me to go with them to the solicitor so that I can aid them in understanding what is being explained to them – of course the solicitor then ascertains that this is indeed the wish or the recommendation that is being made. Sometimes I even leave the room at that stage because the solicitor has to be neutral in taking instructions. But I can be a voice to the older clients and I think it just eases the worry of dealing with legal, financial and even tax matters.

Andrew Griffiths is the private client director at chartered accountants, Plummer Parsons.He can be contacted at andrew.griffiths@plummer-parsons.co.uk