The valuable property record: the trust register that holds no money

A second register, for things that are not money

By-Law 9 requires a licensee to keep a record of every item of property, other than money, held in trust for a client. It is easy to miss because the trust obligations are so strongly associated with the bank account that a register holding no dollar figures does not feel like a trust record at all.

It is one, and it is looked at the same way. The things that land in it are ordinary: an original will held for safekeeping, a duplicate certificate of title, share certificates, a promissory note, bonds, occasionally jewellery or a key.

What each entry has to answer

The register exists so that, years later, someone can establish what was held, for whom, and where it went. In practice that means each entry needs to carry:

• What the item is, described well enough to identify it rather than to categorise it.
• The client and the matter it belongs to.
• The date it came in, and from whom.
• Where it is kept.
• The date it went out, to whom, and on whose authority.

Ten years, and the clock starts late

The valuable property record carries the same ten-year retention as the main trust records. Worth noticing that this is ten years on the record, not on the item: property can sit in safekeeping for decades, and the retention period on the register describing it does not begin to matter until the entry is closed.

This is the one trust record where the practical risk is not an audit finding. An original will that cannot be located when the testator dies is a problem for a family, immediately and irreversibly, and the register is the only thing standing between an ordinary retrieval and a search.

A note on wills specifically

Original wills deserve their own habit. They are the item most often held longest, most often held for someone the firm has not spoken to in years, and the one whose absence is discovered at the worst possible moment.

Firms that handle this well tend to do two unremarkable things. They record where a will is physically stored rather than only that it was received, and they revisit the register when the practice moves offices or changes storage, because that is the moment the mapping between the entry and the shelf silently breaks.