From before death onwards: the grind of executing the will, administering the estate, managing the estate, managing the heirs, managing issues and controversies; managing the testator's specialist unfinished front-office business. I have in mind intricate vulnerable high-value multi-succession multi-jurisdiction estates with lots of unfinished business. And managing will trusts, and estate insolvency, and creditors where the testator was a good or a bad person. And suing the estate manager.
This is where it all goes wrong, as I shall demonstrate.
Why the insistence on the importance of accounts? Because if you have instantly intelligible full, complete, wholly supported, anatomised, geologised, astorised, verified, authenticated, validated whole-truth multi-dimensional nano-accounts, properly line-itemised, in relation to all multi-dimensional layers of all wholly lawful, unimpeachable interacting underlying issues, situations, points, events, episodes, circumstances, communications, activities, relationships and transactions individually, in combination, collectively, discretely and holistically, you're probably going to be ok (and there's nothing one way or another that any accountant can do about it). If not, you're dead (so to speak). Accounts in estate management are like loyalty in a relationship. The practical, verifiable, demonstrable reality of loyalty, not pusillanimous pontificatory platitudinous abstractions such as integrity or character, vouchsafes the rest. (There are no degrees of loyalty. It can't be tested, displayed or proven in gradations. There's no such thing as 100% loyalty because there's no such thing as 99.9% loyalty. You either have it or you don't.)
1: My first inheritance err: executor not paying attention, her lawyer overpays heirs
1989-ish: My maternal grandmother ZB, a bit of an imbecile, apparently left me £100. ZB's will's executor BA had chosen badly in her choice of lawyer and wasn't paying attention. Her lawyer paid me out £200 (and asked for it back. Riiiight.). Apparently she — the lawyer — was thrown out of the profession and went to prison. First inheritance lessons:-
the testator to choose the executor wisely
the executor to choose her helpers wisely
the executor to stay away from lawyers unless necessary — they usually are not — and micro-managed and micro-controlled
the lucky heir should argue that he gets to keep a marginally erroneous payment
the executor is personally liable to the estate for any financial misfeasance, financial ineptitude, etc.
the heirs must insist on genuinely full complete whole-truth honest pellucid real-time executor accounts with all underlying primary source material and the entire file, and must scrutinise, analyse, evaluate, verify and gross- and net-value the merits of every relevant transaction and all underlying facts and circumstances.