May the POA of a trustee act on the behalf of that trustee in the matters of a trust account? Something tells me that is not the case, but I don't know why. Somebody please set me straight.

Thanks in advance,
Jeremy

FP

I think you need to look to your Okla State statutes for sure. If you think about it this far fetched way, I think you will decide it just doesn't pass a "smell" test:

I have a trust drafted, place my assets in it and appoint you to trustee to look after my best interests. Let's say I have a child that I don't trust. I believe that given an opportunity, this child will abscond with my assets and withhold life support, just to get at my money. But I trust you explicitly. Now let's say that time passes and you decide to take a six-month sabbatical but you are afraid to tell me for fear that I will try to talk you out of it - after all who will look after me. Since you are friends with my child, and you don't really know why I chose you over him/her to be my trustee, you give my child your POA, thinking that they will look after me temporarily while you are gone. You go away and while you are gone, my child gains access to my assets, spends them, sells my house, moves me to the most disgusting, dark, cheap, and faraway nursing home s/he can find.

......No, I don't think that the POA that you give to somebody to act as your attorney-in-fact carries through to giving that POA the ability to act on my behalf. Silly scenario - I know, but I think you get the picture

Not a laywer, but...
The trust needs to explicitly state that the POA for the trustee can act, otherwise the answer is no.

We got into this once and almost got burned. A nephew came in with a POA for his uncle who was trustee of the Grandpa's trust. Nephew wanted to close out the accounts and have them put into a cashier's check payable to him. I read the trust and told him that the answer was no because the trust did not allow for it. I did close the accounts because I knew the uncle was very ill and was trying to be helpful. I made the checks payable to the trust instead. Long story short, three months go by, uncle's health improves, nephew has skipped town with all the $$$. DA gets involved. Tracks down Nephew in Florida (we were in KS). Luckily, they recovered all of the $$ except for a travel trailer he bought.

Just be extra careful... If we had handled it badly, we could have been on the hook for major $$.

Thanks, you two, for your insight.

Fiduciary powers cannot be delegated; an attorney-in-fact for someone who happens to be a trustee cannot act as if he were the trustee.

To elaborate (or perhaps bloviate?) on the previous comments - for it to work, two things would be necessary:

1) the trust agreement would need to specifically authorize the trustee to grant a power of attorney to someone; and

2) the power of attorney would need to specify that it is granted to allow the attorney in fact to exercise the principal's powers as trustee (not as an individual)

I've never seen a situation where those two requirements were satisfied.

And to bloviate yet further, you need to separate the individual from the individual acting as trustee. If it helps, think of the trustee as the trust itself. The individual can grant a POA for his/her own transactions or business, but that POA doesn't touch the trust at all.