Discovering lifetime gifts: duty of an executot

Malthusian

But I am not following why the employment of a solicitor would somehow absolve me of legal liability.

Solicitors are legally responsible for their advice. If they miscalculate the IHT bill or fail to pay one of the beneficiaries, they become liable.

Malthusian was right that Moneygram will, for a fee, provide transaction history for up to 10 years

You should be able to make a Subject Access Request which would provide the same information and be free. Companies can no longer charge fees for SARs (in most cases), since the Data Protection Act was replaced by GDPR.

xylophone said: This can mean hours of work ( I speak from relative's recent experience) so those fees can be quite substantial. In respect of establishing gifts from income, relative tells me that he had to trawl fourteen years of financial records to establish the facts.

If you can be reasonably certain that there were no chargeable lifetime transfers (e.g. gifts into a discretionary trust) in the past 14 years, then you can limit your trawling to seven years.

xylophone

then you can limit your trawling to seven years.

Apparently the need arose because the proceeds of an insurance policy had been gifted into Trust  (not discretionary) well over twenty five years before but the deceased was paying the monthly premium from income.

Relative felt that he need to be as sure as possible of the situation before putting his name to the forms, particularly as there was a substantial IHT bill to meet.

Cymro52

I think I can bring this to a conclusion now. Moneygram have confirmed (as Malthusian said would be the case) that a "Request for Historical Transactions" will not attract any fee if made from an EU country (and, for the time being anyway, the UK). I think that a way will be found to evidence my entitlement to make the request. Many thanks everyone for the helpful and interesting  input.