As mentioned last week, the McIntosh case was concerning given that the son’s apparent objective of providing for his mother was not achieved.
While there are obviously a number of issues in relation to this case, three critical steps that could have been taken are as follows:
1) To the extent that they were available, binding nominations could have been made to the mother personally (in this regard, non-binding nominations had in fact been made nominating the mother solely).
2) With the aid of hindsight, the mother should not have applied to administer the deceased estate. This would have relieved her of any duty to act in the best interests of the estate and therefore she could have proceeded to make the application for superannuation benefits to be paid to her personally without her actions being challenged.
3) The son should have made a will at least appointing his mother as executor (this would have potentially meant that she did not have any conflict of interest as the son would have been deemed to have been aware of the potential when making the nomination). Ideally, the will would have also nominated the mother as the sole beneficiary of the estate – thereby meaning that even if the funds were not paid to her directly, she should have ultimately received them in any event.
Next week’s post will consider another case which further informs the key issues in this regard.
** For the trainspotters, the title today is riffed from The Church’s song of the same name, from 1985 (and no, View was not named after this song …).