The caregiver who is also a thief

We each have one. The thief takes liberties with the family money. In this case, it was my sister-in-law. She had an unexpected heart attack about a month ago and now that she’s gone, we are discovering so many financial shenanigans that she took with her mother’s money.

Being the POA of her mom’s affairs, she used her mother’s assets as her personal expense account. Now that she’s gone, my partner has become the POA and she has unraveled all sorts of unusual financial activity, including several large credit card expenditures.  Her mother is in an assisted living facility and is bedridden, so we know that she was not running up excessive charges on a credit card. The overdue balance is close to $8000.

I hear about this happening in many families, where unscrupulous behavior occurs when someone is the POA. When I was the executor of my mom’s estate, it never crossed my mind to steal from her.

My older brother wanted me to cut a check before my mom’s affairs were settled. I told him no, reminding him that his money problems were not mine. I wasn’t going to dole out any inheritance until everything had been settled.

My sister-in-law? She’s been helping herself to my mother-in-law’s money for 11 years after her mother had a stroke. Granted, she did more work than the other two siblings, but she didn’t do it out of the goodness of her heart. She paid herself handsomely. I wonder if her husband knew she was doing this. Did he refuse to buy her expensive jewelry, so she simply helped herself with her mother’s money to vault her lifestyle? She left behind an arsenal of purses, jewelry, and clothing. I suspect her mother’s money paid for most of it.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do. I doubt the husband will reimburse the expenditures back into the mother’s account because the accounts were in both the sister’s and the mother‘s name. But it’s a bunch of paperwork that we have to deal with now. It’s hard enough to grieve over the loss of a sibling, but realising that she was a thief complicates everything.

Has this happened to you? What did you do about it?