Built on a simple discovery: the standards already exist. Nobody was using them.
Estate administration in England and Wales is surrounded by published standards: statutes, regulators' rules, the Law Society's own quality schemes, the Legal Ombudsman's tests. Families are almost never shown them. Probate Audit exists to hold one file up against that published light, and to write down what it shows.
Over a hundred tests, and every single one carries its source.
Behind every report sits a register of more than a hundred individual tests, built from primary sources: legislation read at the statute, the regulators' rules read in the rulebook, the Law Society's standards read in the published documents, the Ombudsman's approach read in its own guidance. Each test records whose standard it is, in the report's plain language: a legal duty, good practice, or our own yardstick, and a test whose source we could not verify does not get used. Where we could not find a published figure, the report says the measure is ours rather than dressing it up as a rule.
That discipline exists because these reports are written to be checked: by you, by the firm we audited, and if it comes to it, by a complaints scheme or a court. A report that survives checking is the entire product.
Designed in, not promised.
- We sell one thing. The report, at one fixed price. There is nothing else to be steered toward.
- We do not administer estates. An auditor that competes with the firms it audits is not independent, so we do not.
- We take no referral fees, and our reports name no firms. Where findings warrant professional help, the report says what kind of specialist to search for, and stops.
- We show our working. The evidence appendix lets anyone check any finding against its source, including the firm we audited.
- We correct errors, publicly to the people who matter. Shown a factual mistake, we reissue the report, versioned, without charge.
David Golding
Probate Audit was built by David Golding, an information technology consultant of more than thirty years' standing whose career has been spent in and around professional-services firms, and whose work sits at the join between evidence, documents and process. The service grew out of a simple observation from the inside: the difference between a well-run estate and a neglected one is visible in the file, if anyone takes the time to read all of it against the standards. Probate Audit takes the time.
Probate Audit is a trading style of Destiny Advisory Ltd, a company serving families with later-life legal paperwork. We are not a firm of solicitors, we are not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and we do not give legal advice, and every report says so on its face. What we produce is careful, sourced, checkable analysis, in plain English.