Omitted Assets in Nevada

Omitted Assets in Nevada

You are a homemaker who is divorced after 20 years of marriage.  Your divorce proceeding has been concluded for over 2 years.  The assets and liabilities have been divided; the minor children have now acclimated to moving between two households; and the divorced former spouses’ financial rights and obligations to each other have long been finalized and implemented.  Then one day, a letter arrives in the mailbox at the former marital residence, enclosing an account statement for a work-related retirement account belonging to your  ex-husband, which appears to have been accrued during the time of your 20-year marriage.  The only problem is that the retirement interest was unknown to you or your lawyer, and was not divided or otherwise addressed in the divorce proceeding.  So, what can be done?

Excluding the possibility of fraud (an extremely flagrant circumstance which has its own set of remedies), it is not unheard of for marital assets to be inadvertently forgotten and “omitted” from disposition in divorce proceedings.  These types of omitted assets run the gamut, from a small but exceedingly valuable coin collection, to a long-ignored military pension, to a neglected brokerage account.  Omitted assets are often unearthed years after the end of a divorce, and sometimes after having increased substantially in value. Fortunately, a long-standing Nevada legal protocol is in place to equitably divide these assets if and when they are discovered.

As to omitted assets in Nevada, it is clear that a Decree of Divorce does not constitute a full and final adjudication where the subject property was not (or could not have been) litigated in court.  In Nevada, community property that is left unadjudicated and undisposed of on divorce as a result of mutual mistake is always subject to subsequent partition in a separate, independent equitable action.  In such situations, the omitted property is beneficially held by the parties as tenants in common until such time as it is partitioned.  See Amie v. Amie, 106 Nev. 541, 796 P.2d 233 (1990).  In fact, this legal authority is so widely recognized by astute family law practitioners that omitted asset partition actions in Nevada are routinely referred to as “Amie” actions.