What Went Wrong is our series on real, published cases. Each entry follows what the documents said, what the court did, and what it teaches. Every quotation comes from the court’s own opinion. These are other parties’ cases, not our clients, and they predict nothing about any reader’s situation.
Most people who suspect something is off with a family trust wait. They wait because the trustee is family, because a fight feels expensive, because paperwork that never arrives is easy to ignore. Here is the published Florida case that puts a price on the waiting, measured in years of records that can never be demanded again.
The setup
Roy Sanders was a beneficiary of several irrevocable trusts in Palm Beach County. The trustee was Doris Rich Corya. In all the years she served, she prepared no accountings for any of the trusts. Not one.
Florida law is not vague about this. A trustee of an irrevocable trust owes each qualified beneficiary a trust accounting at least once a year, a formal report that discloses the transactions, the compensation the trustee and the trustee’s agents took, the gains and losses, and the value of what the trust holds. The duty is old, too. The appellate court traced it back through a predecessor statute to 1974 and rejected the trustee’s argument that nothing was owed before Florida’s modern Trust Code arrived. “We thus reject Corya’s arguments that there was no statutory duty to provide Sanders with accountings prior to July 1, 2007.”
Sanders, meanwhile, did not know any of this. What he told the courts is that he did not learn he was entitled to accountings for each trust until he consulted a Florida attorney in April 2007. Then he sued.
The fight
On the breach itself, Sanders won, and the court’s words could not be plainer. “Failure to prepare an accounting is a breach of trust by a trustee.” The opinion went further about what that kind of breach can cost. “A breach of trust or fiduciary duty is the equivalent of at least a negligent tort, and, under certain facts, may be an intentional tort. The breach may result in an award of damages against the trustee personally.”
Then came the part that gives this case its place in this series. The trustee raised laches, a defense built on delay, and the court agreed that the calendar had been running the whole time Sanders sat in the dark. “We thus conclude, on the facts of this case, that statutory laches under section 95.11(6) limits the right to an accounting, where no accounting has been done, to no more than four years before filing an action for an accounting against the trustee of an irrevocable trust.”
Four years. Not back to the day the trusts began, not back to the day the trustee took office. Four years before the day the lawsuit was filed. The court also read the accounting statute to mean that no trustee could be required to account for periods before January 1, 2003, however old the trust. Everything earlier was simply out of reach, and it took two trips to the appellate court to get even that far.
His answer was human and understandable. He had not known his rights. The court’s response is the sentence every waiting beneficiary should read twice. “His failure to know the law or consult with an attorney is not a lack of actual knowledge of the facts (no accountings given to him) upon which the claim is based.” What might have changed the outcome was proof that the trustee had misled him about those rights, and there was none. “He presented no evidence, and the trial court made no finding, that Corya engaged in conduct that duped Sanders into thinking he was not entitled to accountings or lulled him into not taking legal action to seek accountings.”
One judge, writing separately, would have started the duty even later, because the trust instrument itself contained a provision saying no accounting was owed to Sanders, and in that judge’s view only a 2007 statute making the duty non-waivable overrode it. The majority did not go that way, but the detail is worth knowing. Some trusts try to write the duty away.
One more thing belongs here, because honesty about current law is the point of this series. The four-year cap is still being fought over. In late 2025 the same appellate court, in a different family’s case, directed that a beneficiary be allowed to argue that the Legislature abrogated the cap when it amended the limitations statute in 2018. The cap is good law today and actively contested, and nobody should build a plan on the hope that the ceiling gets lifted later.
What it teaches
Silence from a trustee is not neutral, and it is not safe. The law charges you with the fact you can see, and the fact you can see is that no accounting has arrived. That visible nothing is what starts the clock, whether or not anyone ever told you an accounting was owed. A beneficiary who treats the silence as peace is spending down the very years a court would later let him reclaim.
“I did not know my rights” does not stop the clock. It did not stop it here, against a trustee who had produced nothing at all. The narrow exception is a trustee who actively deceived or lulled the beneficiary, and that has to be proven, not assumed. Once the accountings stop coming, the time to ask a lawyer is now, not once the amounts feel large enough to justify the call.
Know what you are actually owed. An annual accounting is a specific document with required contents, not a courtesy summary and not a stack of statements. Our annotations of the trustee’s duty to account and what a Florida trust accounting must contain spell out the checklist, including how a trustee’s own compensation must be disclosed in the report.
If the accountings have never come, the calendar is the emergency. Under this case, every additional year of patience is a year of records that may pass permanently beyond demand. We litigate exactly these disputes, and the first conversation is about your timeline before anything else. If a trustee in your family has gone quiet, read our trust litigation guide and bring the dates you know to a free 30-minute consult. The look back is short. The decision to start it does not need to be.
The case. Corya v. Sanders, 155 So. 3d 1279 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015), decided on rehearing. The court withdrew an earlier 2014 opinion in the same appeals, and the 2015 opinion is the operative one. Quotations are from the court’s published opinion. The four-year holding remains good law as we write, and it is under active challenge in the same district, as described above. The parties were not clients of this firm, and every case turns on its own facts.
Related Guides
- The trustee duty to account (Fla. Stat. 736.0813)
- What a trust accounting must contain (Fla. Stat. 736.08135)
- Florida trustee fees
- Florida trust litigation attorney
Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.