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How do you find hidden assets in a divorce?

Answered by Divorce at Altitude: A Podcast on Colorado Family Law with Ryan Kalamaya & Amy Goscha · Sep 17, 2026

You find hidden assets in a divorce by going to the source documents: full bank and credit card statements, credit reports, loan applications and business records, not the tax return your spouse hands you. On Divorce at Altitude, Colorado family law attorney Amy Goscha talks with forensic accountant Doug Cash of Eide Bailly, a former fraud detective, about how the money actually gets traced. His core message is that people lie and documents don't, and that the earlier you bring in a forensic accountant, the more leverage you have.

Why the tax return is the wrong place to start

Most people going through a divorce assume the tax return tells the story. Doug's point is that a tax return is built to show the lowest defensible income, because that's what a tax accountant is paid to do. Taxable income and actual income are two different numbers, especially for anyone who owns a business or gets paid in cash.

Instead, he wants the raw material underneath: every bank statement, every credit card statement, the accountant's working papers, business invoices and accounts payable. Those are what he calls source documents. A tax return is a summary someone prepared. A bank statement is a record the bank prepared. Only one of those can be shaped to fit a narrative.

"People lie, documents don't. Source documents are always best because they can't be altered."

The $35 charge that exposed a storage unit

Hidden assets rarely announce themselves. Doug describes a case where a single $35 credit card transaction to a storage company in California turned out to be a climate-controlled unit where the husband had been stashing expensive collectible memorabilia, all bought with cash so it never appeared in any account.

That's the pattern he looks for: small, boring charges to unfamiliar vendors. A storage fee. An insurance premium for something you don't own. A one-time payment to a dealership. Wealthy people also get creative with how they pay, sometimes putting property or vehicles on a credit card specifically so there's no loan or title trail to follow.

The practical method is unglamorous. His team categorizes and summarizes every bank statement line by line, showing how much came in, where it went, and which vendors don't fit the family's normal spending. Suspicious names pop out of the summary in a way they never would from flipping through statements.

"A single credit inquiry on a credit report might reveal a car dealership or property purchase paid in cash."

Credit reports and loan applications tell on people

Two documents Doug says people forget to request are credit reports from all three bureaus and any loan applications the other spouse has filed.

A credit report shows inquiries. If your spouse applied for financing at a car dealership or a mortgage lender and there's no matching loan on the books, that's a strong signal a purchase happened another way. Loan applications are even better. When someone wants a bank to say yes, they list every asset they have and inflate their income. That's the opposite incentive from a divorce financial disclosure, where the goal is to look as poor as possible. Comparing the two often does the work for you.

For business owners, he goes further: verifying actual distributions and cash withdrawals by reconciling bank statements against invoices and accounts payable, rather than trusting the profit and loss statement.

Forensic accountant or business valuation expert?

People confuse the two, and they do very different jobs. A business valuation expert takes the financial statements more or less at face value and produces an opinion about what the business is worth. Different valuators regularly disagree with each other. A forensic accountant rebuilds the finances from the bottom up using source documents and produces facts: this much cash came in, this much went to that vendor, this account exists.

In Doug's experience, forensic findings tend to hold up on their own in court because they're not opinions. If you suspect the numbers feeding the valuation are wrong, the forensic work has to come first.

What it costs and when to call one

A full forensic engagement is expensive, and Doug is upfront about that. But it's not all or nothing. The lower-cost entry point is statement categorization, where technology lets his team process roughly a thousand transactions in five minutes instead of a hundred an hour by hand. Scopes can be narrowed too, for example to the last 18 months rather than a full seven years. Initial consultations are typically free.

The timing advice is the part most people get wrong. Call a forensic accountant early, before sworn financial statements are prepared, especially if your spouse controls a business or you genuinely don't know where the money goes. Early involvement lets the accountant help shape discovery requests so the right documents get demanded from the start, instead of trying to fix a bad disclosure months later.

People also ask

How much does a forensic accountant cost in a divorce?

A full engagement can be expensive, but Doug Cash explains that categorizing and summarizing statements is a much cheaper starting point, scopes can be limited to recent years, and initial consultations are usually free.

What are the biggest red flags that a spouse is hiding money?

A lifestyle that doesn't match reported income, cash deposits followed by quick withdrawals, credit inquiries with no matching loan, and one-off payments to vendors you don't recognize.

Can a forensic accountant find hidden cash?

Often yes, indirectly. Cash purchases still leave traces like storage fees, insurance policies, credit inquiries or vendor payments, and comparing bank inflows against reported income shows where cash is disappearing.

Based on Episode 241, "Forensic Accounting in Colorado Divorce: Finding Hidden Income and Assets," released February 12, 2026 on Divorce at Altitude, hosted by Colorado attorneys Ryan Kalamaya and Amy Goscha.