Advice on Deceased Bank Account: What to Do?

Questioner

My question concerns: a bank account that has never been closed. The story behind creating as complete a picture as possible: My grandmother died in 2000 (her husband died much longer ago). She had/has a number of children. The oldest son has always lived with his mother because he is mentally disabled. He still lives (although independently) in the parental home. Now we (children/grandchildren) are going to arrange for him to move to a more supervised living project. From research in the administration it now appears that there is still an account (not and/or) in her name. As far as we know, nothing has ever happened to it, the money is just there (however, we cannot say for sure because there are no more statements from that long ago). When asked, he did indeed indicate that he sometimes received mail in his mother's name and found that annoying, but he did not report it to anyone else. There was no further will and the money/property was never divided and simply remained with the eldest son (with everyone's consent, verbally). Of course, the other children had made arrangements after the death, but this bill apparently 'slipped through the cracks'. Over time, the bank was also taken over. We suspect that not handing over a death certificate to a bank is punishable. We would like to find out - as annoying as that is - and we are very concerned about it. We would like to use this method to obtain more information on how to act now and what the law says. Hopefully you can help us further. Thank you in advance.

Lawyer

What happened does not fall under criminal law. I advise you to go to the bank with the death certificate and a certificate of inheritance. Once you have access to the account you can divide the money among the heirs. If there are multiple heirs they must authorize you to act for them in this case.

Questioner

Thank you very much for your clear answer, we are very reassured by this and will handle it this way. Kind regards!