The denial of various objections to the executor’s account should be affirmed on appeal:
- The failure of the objectant to seek discovery before trial, and the resulting failure to provide evidence to support the objections to the account, cannot be excused by alleging that the accountant breached a fiduciary duty to make full disclosures to the beneficiaries.
- The previous refusal to disqualify accountant’s counsel was not appealed, and is now res judicata.
- The “accountant” is the fiduciary presenting an account and is not required to be a lawyer, and neither the accountant nor his counsel owed any duty to the beneficiaries while defending the account against objections.
- The court’s finding that the sale price obtained for an estate property was reasonable was supported by testimony from a realtor and an appraiser, and the objectant’s appeal should be dismissed for failing to identify the evidence in the record claimed to be contrary to the court’s findings.
- The original objection was that the accountant should be surcharged for the delay in terminating the decedent’s car lease, but the issue presented on appeal is that the accountant failed to produce the lease agreement, but there was sufficient testimony on the amount of the lease termination fee.
- Although the accountant paid the claim of the nursing home for room and board, the nursing home later refunded the payment so the objection to the payment is moot.
- Objections to the payment of relatively small claims by medical providers were properly dismissed when the objectants failed to present any evidence that the claims would have been covered by insurance, and the payments are not a “significant discrepancy” requiring an explanation by the accountant.
- An objection to the payment of inheritance tax on “assets not subject” to tax was properly dismissed in the absence of any evidence as to what assets were not taxable, and the objectants cannot claim on appeal that inheritance tax was underpaid because of a “taxable distribution” made from the decedent’s checking account three months before death.
- The decedent’s gift of her business interests to her business partner did not include gifts of computers or other assets she held, or gifts of electronic records on her computer, the wiping of the hard drive of the decedent’s computer was not a breach of fiduciary duty, and the claimed business losses by the partner were not supported by sufficient evidence.
Fellman Estate, 3 Fid.Rep.4th 288 (Montgomery O.C. 2025), on app., 1587 EDA 2025 (Pa. Super.).