Identify Contested Divorce Financial Discovery

Skill: Contested Divorce Financial Discovery — Issue Identification Memorandum

1. Subject-matter triage

• Treat the valuation report, financial affidavit, tax returns, K-1s, bank statements, and supporting schedules as one integrated record.
• Identify each distinct issue by document, period, and affected account, business, or asset; do not merge separate discrepancies into a single narrative pass.
• If only one period, entity, or account is in scope, say so explicitly and analyze that single item on that basis.

2. Failure modes the skill is correcting

• Accepting a business valuation’s EBITDA computations without independently verifying the arithmetic or confirming that stated normalization adjustments were carried into the weighted average calculation.
• Missing normalization omissions, including below-market related-party occupancy costs and owner perquisites that affect both valuation and support income.
• Failing to scrutinize whether a marketability discount is appropriate in a dissolution setting where the interest is not being sold to a third party.
• Overlooking pre-separation withdrawals, transfers, or wires that may support dissipation or concealment arguments.
• Treating the financial affidavit as current without checking whether the disclosure date is stale relative to the relevant hearing or filing date.
• Omitting a consolidated true-income analysis after adjustments, which can alter maintenance and child-support posture.
• Failing to tie each discrepancy to source-document support, legal significance, and practical consequence.

3. Legal frameworks / domain conventions that apply

• Business valuation arithmetic must reconcile across the report, underlying statements, and tax materials; a weighted average must be mathematically consistent with the component-year figures and adjustments.
• Owner compensation should be normalized to market for the role actually performed; excess compensation may indicate income suppression for support purposes, while excess perquisites may be imputed as income.
• Related-party expense adjustments require market benchmarking; below-market occupancy costs generally understate EBITDA and can distort value.
• Dissipation doctrine turns on tracing pre-separation transfers of marital funds to non-marital or unexplained uses; once transactions are identified, the burden commonly shifts to the recipient spouse to account for the funds.
• Marketability discounts in equitable distribution are contested and should be assessed against the dissolution context, not assumed from a hypothetical sale framework.
• Financial disclosure duties often require timely updating of affidavits and schedules; stale disclosure undermines reliability and may warrant supplementation or challenge.
• Misclassification of non-refundable customer receipts as deferred revenue can understate income and inflate liabilities when the receipt is economically earned upon receipt.
• Cite the governing valuation principle, disclosure rule, dissipation doctrine, or evidentiary authority used in the jurisdictional record or, if absent, the standard controlling authority recognized in family-law valuation practice.

4. Analytical scaffolds

1. Start with the valuation report and verify each year’s EBITDA arithmetic against the underlying financial statements and tax support.
2. For each normalization adjustment, determine whether it was included, whether the amount is correctly stated, and whether it was carried through consistently to any weighted average or summary figure.
3. Identify every related-party transaction reflected in the record, then test whether the expense level matches market terms and whether any adjustment was omitted.
4. Compare owner compensation and benefits against the business’s size, role requirements, and operating results; flag patterns consistent with overpayment, underpayment, or disguised income.
5. Review asset disclosures and account schedules for stale, nominal, or internally inconsistent values; compare against contemporaneous market data where available.
6. Trace bank activity around the separation date and in the surrounding period; isolate large withdrawals, transfers, cash movements, or wires to unidentified recipients.
7. Reconcile income-like receipts, deposits, and business inflows against the characterization used in the filings; flag items that appear misclassified.
8. Assess the marketability discount in light of the dissolution posture, ownership transfer mechanics, and any source-document facts suggesting the discount is overstated.
9. After all corrections, state the revised income picture as a consolidated analytical conclusion for support analysis.

5. Vertical / structural / temporal relationships

• The valuation report is the lead document; the supporting financial statements, tax returns, and general-ledger-style materials are the cross-checks.
• The financial affidavit is compared against bank records, brokerage statements, and other account schedules for consistency.
• The separation date anchors the dissipation inquiry; transfers closest in time to that date warrant the closest scrutiny.
• A discrepancy can be both a valuation issue and a support issue; capture both effects when they arise from the same underlying fact.
• If a document date predates a hearing or filing by enough time to raise staleness concerns, note the timing gap and the resulting reliability issue.

6. Output structure conventions

• Produce a single issue-identification memorandum in conventional legal memo form.
• Open with a brief issue summary and a severity key using a uniform ordinal scale such as Critical / High / Medium / Low.
• Then organize the memo by functional topic: valuation and EBITDA reconciliation; normalization adjustments; related-party and compensation issues; asset and affidavit discrepancies; income-characterization issues; dissipation and transfer tracing; procedural or timeliness defects; recommended discovery or follow-up.
• For each issue, include: severity, concise description, source-document basis, controlling legal or valuation principle, magnitude or scale drawn from the record, cross-reference to the interacting document or schedule, and downstream consequence for value, support, or litigation posture.
• Include a separate consolidated income analysis after adjustments, stated as a support-relevant conclusion rather than a speculative estimate.
• End with an explicit Recommended Actions block that directs the next step, identifies the responsible role, and ties timing to the next filing, hearing, disclosure update, or discovery milestone.
• Keep the memo issue-focused; do not narrate the documents in sequence unless that sequence explains the discrepancy.