Gathering financial documents for discovery – best practices

Beth Garrett

By Beth Garrett, Forensic CPA at Frazier & Deeter

Updated January 10, 2025

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My name is Beth Garrett. I’m a partner at Frazier and Dieter, which is an accounting firm headquartered in Atlanta. And my practice is centered around all of the financial aspects of divorce. The biggest thing to keep in mind is just to really start thinking about all of your assets. If you’re contemplating divorce or starting to think about divorce. Tax returns are a lot of times where we start. That’s what I like to see first. So whether that’s getting them from the CPA or if they’re stored in the house somewhere, looking at the last few years of tax returns is going to give me a lot of information about what else I need.

And then if you have a financial advisor getting the statements for all financial accounts for the last few years from them, or if you can get them online, a lot of times it’s first figuring out what you have and then how you’re going to get the statements to kind of back that up. We’re going to want to see a little bit of a history, a little bit of pattern. Then we think about real property. So if there have been any appraisals or refinances done, if you have settlement statements for real property that was purchased during the marriage or prior to the marriage, thinking about other assets you might have.

If you have insurance appraisals for jewelry or for artwork or some kind of personal property like that might have substantial value, that’s a lot of the financial things that we kind of the basis for what we start with is as much as you’re able to kind of put together think what would be on your personal financial statement, we’re going to need backup for all of that.

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