When married couples decide to divorce, they have to find ways to divide their property. That process can be difficult when they share a significant amount of assets or have remained married for years.
It can become even more difficult to achieve a fair outcome in scenarios where one spouse engages in inappropriate behavior. Occasionally, one spouse wants to manipulate the outcome of divorce proceedings and may engage in blatant misconduct in an attempt to influence the outcome of the property division process.
What types of financial misconduct can complicate divorce proceedings and result in unfair property division terms?
Misclassifying property
Spouses generally have to share their marital property but do not have to share their separate property. Assets that one spouse inherited or owned before marriage can remain their separate property in many cases. Some people misrepresent the nature of their assets in an attempt to trick or manipulate their spouses into accepting less than they should during the property division process.
Hiding marital assets
Some spouses take things a step further than misclassifying the assets they report. They may intentionally exclude certain resources from their inventory of marital assets. Spouses may start hidden bank accounts and choose not to disclose them. They may move physical possessions into storage or give them to others temporarily to hide them from their spouses and the courts. Hidden assets can sometimes be worth thousands of dollars, which means that they can drastically alter the outcome of property division proceedings.
Wasting marital resources
Some people engage in dissipation before or during a divorce. They intentionally waste marital property, destroy marital assets or take on unnecessary debt. The goal is to diminish the total value of the marital estate and therefore how much property they have to share with a spouse when they divorce.
Those who uncover signs of financial misconduct can potentially hold their spouses accountable for their inappropriate behavior. Reviewing financial disclosures carefully and working with the right professionals can help people achieve a fair outcome when they divorce. Financial misconduct can be hard to identify without appropriate support, especially if one spouse planned to outfox the other for months or years before divorcing.
