Most trustees understand they have a duty of loyalty and a duty of prudence. Far fewer understand the duty that quietly generates more litigation than any other: the duty to keep beneficiaries reasonably informed about the trust and its administration.
This is not a courtesy. It is a mandatory fiduciary obligation codified in the Uniform Trust Code, adopted in virtually every state that has enacted trust legislation. A trustee who fails to provide accountings, respond to beneficiary requests for information, or disclose material facts about trust administration is committing a breach of fiduciary duty — whether or not they have mismanaged a single dollar.
And courts are getting less patient about it. Recent decisions have expanded surcharge liability, upheld punitive damages, and extended statutes of limitations when trustees keep beneficiaries in the dark. The trustee who says “I haven’t done anything wrong, I just haven’t told anyone about it” is the trustee who ends up explaining that position to a judge.
Here is what the duty to inform actually requires, where trustees go wrong, and how to build a system that keeps you on the right side of it.
The Legal Foundation: UTC Section 813
The Uniform Trust Code’s Section 813 — titled “Duty to inform and report” — is the statutory backbone of the trustee’s duty to inform. Most states that have adopted the UTC have enacted this section with only minor variations. Florida’s version is at Section 736.0813 of the Florida Statutes. Kansas has it at K.S.A. 58a-813. The language is substantially the same everywhere.
The statute imposes several specific obligations:
The trustee shall keep qualified beneficiaries reasonably informed about the administration of the trust and of the material facts necessary for them to protect their interests. This is the general standard — the floor. It is not a passive obligation. The trustee must affirmatively keep beneficiaries informed, not merely respond when asked.
The trustee shall respond to reasonable requests from qualified beneficiaries for information related to the administration of the trust. This is the obligation that catches most trustees off guard. A beneficiary does not need to file a lawsuit to request information. A simple email or letter qualifies as a “reasonable request,” and the trustee must respond within a reasonable time — generally 30 to 60 days.
Upon request, the trustee shall promptly furnish a copy of the trust to a qualified beneficiary. Beneficiaries have the right to see the trust instrument itself, not just summaries of it. A trustee who refuses to share the trust document — often because the settlor asked them to keep it private — is violating a statutory duty that, in most states, cannot be waived.
The trustee shall provide a trustee’s report at least annually to qualified beneficiaries. This is the annual accounting requirement, and it is the one most commonly ignored by family trustees.
Who is a “qualified beneficiary”?
The duty to inform runs to “qualified beneficiaries,” a defined term under the UTC. A qualified beneficiary is generally:
- A beneficiary currently entitled or eligible to receive distributions from the trust
- A beneficiary who would be entitled or eligible to receive distributions if the current beneficiaries’ interests terminated or if the trust terminated on that date
This means remainder beneficiaries — the people who will receive assets after the current beneficiary dies — are often qualified beneficiaries entitled to the same information as current beneficiaries. A trustee who only sends accountings to the income beneficiary and ignores the remaindermen is making a mistake that courts have corrected repeatedly.
The settlor can, in some states, modify these requirements for irrevocable trusts during the settlor’s lifetime. But the core duty to inform — the obligation to tell beneficiaries the trust exists, who the trustee is, and what is happening with trust assets — is, in most jurisdictions, non-waivable.
What a Proper Trust Accounting Must Include
The statute does not mandate a specific format. But the accounting must contain enough information for a beneficiary of ordinary intelligence to understand the trust’s financial condition and the trustee’s actions. A summary letter saying “the trust is doing fine” is not an accounting.
At minimum, a proper accounting should include:
- Beginning inventory: A complete list of trust assets at the start of the accounting period, with values
- Income received: All income during the period, itemized by source (interest, dividends, rent, business income, etc.)
- Disbursements: All payments made, including distributions to beneficiaries, expenses paid, and professional fees
- Asset purchases and sales: Every transaction involving trust property, with the transaction date, counterparty, and price
- Ending inventory: Current values of all trust assets at the end of the period
- Trustee compensation: The total amount paid to the trustee, broken down by category if the trustee charges different rates for different services
- Professional fees: Amounts paid to attorneys, accountants, investment advisors, and other professionals — and their relationship to the trustee, if any
- Reconciliation: A clear showing that beginning balance plus income minus disbursements equals ending balance
The accounting should also disclose any transactions where the trustee had a personal interest. If the trustee purchased trust property, sold personal property to the trust, or borrowed from trust funds, those transactions must be disclosed — even if the terms were fair. Failure to disclose self-dealing is itself a breach, independent of whether the deal was fair.
Supporting documentation matters. Beneficiaries have the right to review bank statements, brokerage statements, and receipts that verify the accounting’s accuracy. A trustee who provides only summary figures without backup documentation has not satisfied the duty to account.
The Common Mistakes That Create Liability
Even well-meaning trustees systematically misunderstand what the duty to inform requires. Here are the five most common failures I see:
1. Providing informal updates instead of accountings
A periodic email or family meeting update is helpful, but it is not a substitute for a formal accounting. The statute requires accountings — financial statements with sufficient detail for a beneficiary to understand the trust’s position. Informal communication supplements the duty; it does not satisfy it.
2. Selective disclosure
Some trustees provide accountings to the “easy” beneficiaries and withhold them from the “difficult” ones. Unless the trust instrument explicitly creates different classes with different information rights, all qualified beneficiaries are entitled to the same level of information. Playing favorites violates the duty of impartiality as much as the duty to inform.
3. Ignoring remainder beneficiaries
The most dangerous mistake. Remainder beneficiaries who will not receive anything until the current beneficiary dies are often qualified beneficiaries under the UTC. A trustee who treats them as irrelevant until the income beneficiary passes away is setting up a situation where the remainder beneficiaries discover — years later — that the trust was poorly administered, and the statute of limitations has never started running because the trustee never provided adequate disclosure.
4. Refusing to share the trust document
Settlors often ask trustees to keep the trust’s existence or terms private. In most states, that request cannot override the statutory duty to furnish a copy of the trust to qualified beneficiaries upon request. A trustee who honors the settlor’s request for silence over the beneficiary’s statutory right to information is personally exposed.
5. Delaying indefinitely
Some trustees fall behind on accountings and assume they will “catch up” later. This compounds the problem. As time passes, reconstructing transactions becomes harder, beneficiaries lose the ability to identify and correct problems while they are still fixable, and the delay itself suggests the trustee may be hiding something. Courts view unexplained delays in providing accountings as evidence of bad faith.
What Happens When Trustees Fail
The consequences of failing to inform and account are severe — and courts are making them more severe. Consider what has happened in recent litigation:
Compelled accountings and removal. Under UTC Section 706 (and its state-law equivalents), courts can remove trustees for serious breaches of trust, including failure to provide information. In Florida, courts have repeatedly held that a trustee’s persistent refusal to account justifies removal — treating the trust as a private affair is a fundamental violation of the fiduciary role.
Expanded surcharge liability. In In re Will of Cameron, 335 A.3d 760 (Pa. Super. 2025), the Pennsylvania Superior Court held that a trustee who used a trust-secured line of credit to fund personal and family business ventures could be surcharged for the full benefit conferred on the trustee and non-beneficiary family members — even though the trust corpus suffered no monetary loss and the line of credit was repaid. The court drew on UTC Section 1001 and the Restatement (Third) of Trusts Section 100(b), both of which frame the remedy as restoring the trust or accounting for benefits received, not merely compensating for losses. The reasoning applies in every state that has adopted the UTC’s remedial provisions.
Punitive damages and fee-shifting. In Mendell v. Scott, 2023 Tex. App. LEXIS 5382, a trustee who breached her duty to disclose — withholding information about the trust’s status and refusing to terminate the trust after a valid disclaimer — was hit with compensatory damages, punitive damages, and an award of the beneficiaries’ attorney’s fees. The court rejected the trustee’s argument that the trust instrument authorized her to pay her own legal fees from trust assets, holding that a trustee who breaches with malice cannot use trust funds to defend her own misconduct.
Extended statutes of limitations. This is the trap most trustees do not see coming. Under UTC Section 1008, beneficiaries generally have a limited time (often three to four years) to challenge trustee actions after receiving an adequate accounting. But if the trustee never provides an adequate accounting, the limitations period may never begin running. A trustee who skips annual accountings for five years is not just behind on paperwork — they are keeping the statute of limitations open for the entire period. Every decision they made during those five years remains challengeable.
In Sutherlin v. Wells Fargo & Co., 297 F. Supp. 3d 1271 (M.D. Fla.), the court recognized that the trustee’s failure to notify and inform beneficiaries supported broader breach of fiduciary duty claims. The failure to account was not a procedural footnote — it was the foundation of the liability finding.
The Special Problem of Family Trustees
Family trustees — adult children serving as trustee for a parent’s trust, siblings serving for a deceased sibling’s trust — are the most common violators of the duty to inform. They are also the most sympathetic. The reasoning is usually some variation of: “We’re family. Everyone knows what’s going on. Formal accountings would be insulting.”
That reasoning does not survive contact with a probate court. Family dynamics do not exempt trustees from fiduciary duties. In fact, family relationships make clear documentation more important, not less. When family members have different expectations about how the trust should be administered — and they always do — the accounting is what prevents a disagreement from becoming a lawsuit.
The family trustee who says “I don’t need to send my sister a formal accounting, she knows what’s in the trust” is the same trustee who, three years later, is sitting across from that sister’s lawyer explaining why $40,000 in trustee fees were reasonable and why three distributions were made to one sibling and not the other.
The duty to inform exists precisely because family trust and informal communication are not reliable substitutes for documented accountability. The statute does not say “unless the trustee and beneficiaries are related.” The duty applies to everyone.
The Practical System: What Trustees Should Do
Compliance with the duty to inform is not complicated, but it requires a system. Here is what that system should look like:
Step 1: Identify your qualified beneficiaries
Before you can inform anyone, you need to know who is entitled to information. Map every qualified beneficiary — current beneficiaries and remainder beneficiaries who would take if the trust terminated today. Update this list whenever a beneficiary dies, a new beneficiary is born, or trust interests change.
Step 2: Establish an annual accounting cadence
Set a fixed date for the annual accounting — typically the end of the calendar year or the end of the trust’s fiscal year. Prepare the accounting within 60 to 90 days of that date. Deliver it to every qualified beneficiary. Keep proof of delivery.
Step 3: Document information requests and responses
Every time a beneficiary requests information, log the request, the date received, and the date you responded. If you need more than 30 days, communicate that. If a request is unreasonable — overly broad, duplicative, or clearly intended to harass — document why and consult counsel. But do not simply ignore it.
Step 4: Disclose conflicts and self-dealing proactively
If you have any transaction where your personal interests intersect with the trust’s — buying trust property, hiring a family member as a service provider, using trust assets as collateral — disclose it in the next accounting, before anyone asks. The duty to inform includes the duty to disclose material facts that might affect a beneficiary’s rights. Hiding a conflict and getting caught is worse than disclosing it and defending the terms.
Step 5: Provide a copy of the trust when asked
Do not refuse. Do not delay. Do not ask the settlor’s estate for permission. If a qualified beneficiary requests a copy of the trust, provide it. If you have a legitimate concern about disclosure — for example, the trust contains sensitive information about another beneficiary — consult counsel about redaction, but do not use privacy concerns as an excuse to withhold the document entirely.
Step 6: Keep communication professional and documented
Family trustees should resist the temptation to handle trust communications through casual text messages or verbal updates. Every substantive communication about the trust — accountings, information responses, distribution decisions — should be in writing, retained, and filed. If a beneficiary later claims they were never informed, you need to be able to prove otherwise.
How TrustOffice Helps
The duty to inform is fundamentally a documentation and communication problem — and that is exactly the problem TrustOffice was built to solve.
TrustOffice’s beneficiary communication module makes annual accountings automatic. Generate a complete accounting — beginning inventory, income, disbursements, asset transactions, ending balances, trustee compensation, professional fees — from your trust’s transaction record. No manual compilation. No spreadsheets. No reconstructing the year from email threads.
Every communication is logged and timestamped. When a beneficiary requests information, the request is recorded in the system. When you respond, the response is linked to the request. If a beneficiary later claims they were never informed, your defense is one click away — not a search through five years of correspondence.
Conflicts and self-dealing are flagged for disclosure. TrustOffice’s governance workflows identify transactions where the trustee has a personal interest and prompt disclosure in the next accounting. You will not accidentally bury a related-party transaction that should have been surfaced.
The statute of limitations clock starts when you send the accounting. TrustOffice records the delivery date of every accounting and information response. When a beneficiary receives an adequate accounting, the limitations period begins. When they do not, TrustOffice’s audit trail shows exactly what was provided and when — protecting you from claims that you failed to inform.
Qualified beneficiary tracking keeps your distribution list current. As beneficiaries die, new ones are born, and trust interests change, TrustOffice maintains the list of who is entitled to information. You will not accidentally exclude a remainder beneficiary from an annual accounting because you forgot they qualified.
The duty to inform is the duty that protects both the beneficiary and the trustee. It gives the beneficiary the information they need to protect their interests, and it gives the trustee the documentation they need to prove they acted properly. The trustees who get in trouble are the ones who treat it as optional. The trustees who sleep well at night are the ones who have a system.
The Bottom Line
The duty to inform and account is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a core fiduciary obligation — as fundamental as the duty of loyalty and the duty of prudence. Courts treat it that way, and the consequences of ignoring it are real: removal, surcharge, punitive damages, extended liability, and the loss of exculpatory protections that would otherwise shield you.
If you are a trustee and you have not provided an accounting in the last 12 months, you are already in breach. If you have not responded to a beneficiary’s information request within 30 days, you are already in breach. If you have not told your qualified beneficiaries who you are and what you are doing with their trust, you are already in breach.
The fix is not complicated. Identify your qualified beneficiaries. Prepare an accounting. Send it. Document the response. Repeat annually. If the system feels overwhelming, that is a sign you need a tool to manage it — not a sign that the duty does not apply to you.
Book a free call to see how TrustOffice can automate your beneficiary communications, generate audit-ready accountings, and keep you on the right side of the duty to inform — or subscribe for $79/month and start building your trust governance system today.
