I was curious what everyone else does? We have decided to implement a practice that for situations of a joint account owner's (interest bearing account) death rather than change names, SSN, etc... the account will be closed and a new account be opened. We have checking accounts out there that we no longer open. Instead of the product they are used to... we move them to a comparable account. Of course... this makes more than a few customers upset.

What does everyone else do?

We close the account and reopen. It's cleaner and less work for the bank if the individuals wind up having problems down the road.

When my mom passed away I was very glad that my dad didn't have to close his account. It had been open more than 40 years, had several direct deposits and auto-debits to/from it. Dealing with closing and opening a new account would have been one big hassle not needed at a time of loss.

If the surviving owner wasn't the one who paid the bills and handled the account, this would further complicate an already bad situation. That person is already hurt and angry. I would believe that some of that may be taken out on the bank. If you make them change everything anyway, they may just make a clean change to a new bank with an "I'll show you" attitude.

If this were a divorce, that would be different. If the goal is to get rid of accounts you no longer offer, I'd look for a different way to do this.

Ditto to AndyZ. You want you're customer to say how you went out of the ay to help them in their time of greif. As for divorce, absolutley close and reopen.

For death situations, we will amedn the existing account with a death certificate - kind of cruel not to do so. For other situations (divorce, etc), we used to allow the account to remain with an affidavit signed by owner coming off the account, but we changed that policy and now close and open new.

If a customer wants to drop a name on an account due to the death of one of the owners, we require a copy of the death certificate and then we will modify the account. For all other situations, the account must be closed and a new one opened.

We have also found that a lot of widows (especially the older ones) like to keep their deceased husband's name on the account and the checks so as not to advertise that they may be living alone.

We also have acquired some accounts through mergers and discontinued others over the years. We will send the customer a notice/disclosure explaining the type of account that they will be switched to, enclose a brochure with all account types, and then give them 30 days to inform us if they would rather have a different one than the one we chose for them. After that, it's just a matter of changing the class code on the system.

We require the account to be closed and a new one reopened. It is my understanding if you change a primary name to the secondary for any reason, you have to report interest to the IRS at yearend for the primary owner up to the point his name is removed and then interest for the new primary after that point. My bank system will not handle tracking of two socials for one account for IRS reporting. How do you handle this problem?

We also leave acct open, remove name w/ death cert., etc. as some indicated above. To handle interest allocation, with ITI (our provider), we create a tax addenda for deceased with the allocated interest for that tax year, maintain the account YTD history to zero out the interest paid (or difference if not all int already paid belongs to deceased) then switch/replace the names so the system reports any interest paid going forward under new taxpayer name and tax-id #.

What does everyone do for POD's on CD's? We have been just switching the name (with death certificate proof). But management nows wants to close the CD and open new one. Rates being lower of course being the reason.

It is part of the core system and is attached to the Portfolio (CIF) for that customer. So it's always available, anytime. Year end processing just pulls any attached tax addenda's from all Ports.

Nice! I wish we had that. I will have to add it to my wish list with Jack Henry.

ONe problem we discovered with just 'dropping' or removing the name of the deceased owner (With our current Jack Henry CoreDirector systems), is that if the estate comes back later and asks for a listing of all accounts at the time of death - we cannot find them, because we dropped that former owners name. By closing the accounts "as-is" and opening the new accounts we are able to preserve that all important audit trail

With ITI's portfolio CIF system we can remove the name on the account level, but continue to retain it on the Port as it always was. The Port is not set to purge until all attached accounts are closed and thier summary history (which is created and attached to the portfolio for another client-defined length of time upon closure of the account) are expired and deleted. This maximizes our ability to at least find the deceased on our system and then we can backtrack through all maintenance changes on all accounts that are/were in that portfolio to see if they were on them once upon a time.

Let me clarify one point with Core - we can look at the maintenance history and find those changes and confirm both there and on the signature card who the former owners were - However, doing name and TIN look up will not help us, so we have opted to do the close and open format. Plus, I think it is a much 'cleaner' record.