Essential information for Solicitors and executors

The Government licenses a firm of Probate Agents to inform charities if they have been left a gift in a Will. This system has been in place since the 19th Century and explains why the charity may have contacted you before you have had a chance to contact them. It isn’t widely known, but once a Will has gone through Probate it is a public document, and anyone can view the contents by paying a small fee on the .gov website. Many charities will purchase every Will that contains a gift to them to satisfy their auditors that they are receiving every gift that they should.

Acting as an Executor can be an onerous task, and it is perfectly possible for you to instruct a Solicitor to deal with aspects of administration that you are finding difficult or excessively time consuming without being required to hand the whole process over to them.

Firstly, it’s important to understand that although it can seem as though charities are asking you for a lot of detailed information, they are not trying to be difficult but are simply subject to strict legal and accounting regulations which they must comply with. Gifts in Wills, particularly a share of the estate (also known as a residuary legacy, because it is a share of what is left in the estate once debts etc are paid, hence the ‘residue’) are also a vital income stream for charities, so it’s important for them to be able to estimate the value of each gift for long-term project planning.

It can be hard to know who is responsible for what. Below is a list of the key responsibilities held by Executors, Charities and Auditors: • Executors – Executors are responsible for distributing the estate as detailed in the Will and need to produce a full account as set out in the Administration of Estates Act 1925. • Charities – Charities need to provide you with a receipt and, where appropriate, an indemnity. They also need to confirm bank details for payment. They need to account for legacies in accordance with the SORP (see glossary below) and provide evidence to support their method. • Auditors – The charities Auditors must confirm that legacy income has been accounted for correctly and that the amounts shown on their accounts and received are correct. They pay particular attention to gifts in Wills because it is such a large income stream for some charities.

We’ve put together a useful checklist which outlines the documents a charity should hold and where these can be sourced from, should you be asked for them. The checklist is divided into three categories: Essential Documents, Documents to provide if possible, and Documents that may be required dependent upon circumstances. You can read more about these categories in the glossary in the next section, and can [LINK see a full list of required documents in the document checklist factsheet in the Guidance for Executors section on the ILM’s website]. Our members and charities work together very closely in this area, so to save you time we recommend you contact one of the charities named in the Will and ask them to act as a ‘postbox’, distributing correspondence to the other charities. This is known as the ‘Lead Charity’ system.