You have decided to get a divorce and you suspect your soon-to-be-ex-husband or -wife has hidden some money from your joint accounts or has transferred some of your Virginia property to someone else. What do you do? Luckily, an experienced family law attorney will help you uncover these hidden assets in order to ensure you receive an equitable division of your marital assets.

Finding or tracking down missing real estate may actually be much easier than it sounds, since all real estate transactions must be written down. Your divorce attorney can go to the local Richmond government and see whether any of your real estate has been transferred to someone else. He or she can then present that as evidence that your spouse is trying to prevent an equitable distribution in the divorce settlement.

While some spouses will try to hide assets from a family court judge, when the judge starts to suspect that the spouse is shielding some of the property or finances, he or she may start to believe there is much more being hidden than actually is. If a spouse has hidden $10,000 and the judge discovers this, it may be difficult for the spouse to convince the judge that it was only $10,000 that was not disclosed.

In many cases, there will be some record that traces where assets come from and where they go, so some family law professionals encourage anyone getting a divorce to subpoena financial records as soon as possible. The earlier the information is subpoenaed, the less likely it will be that a spouse can successfully hide any assets. Any major changes in a bank account since the original subpoena, for example, will raise questions about where the money went and whether it was properly transferred.

Virginia residents getting a divorce know that dividing up marital property is bound to stir up considerable emotions in both spouses. One party wants to get as much of the marital estate as possible and the other wants a fair and equitable distribution of the estate. Fortunately, Virginia divorce lawyers know how to properly seek out and discover any assets a less-than-scrupulous spouse is trying to hide.

Source: ABA Journal, "Show Me the Money: Helping Clients Find and Protect Assets in a Divorce," Stephanie Frances Ward, Feb. 6, 2012