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| Visions & Revisions |
The Business of Trust Busting
Marianne Cotter
01/01/2004
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The job of the trustee is to ensure that the benefactor’s wishes are carried out. It is not to acquiesce to beneficiaries who do not like the terms of the trust.
Yes and no, respectively. If a benefactor’s wishes are reasonable and in the best interests of the beneficiaries, the trustee should be able to execute them responsibly. However, some situations make it impossible for a trustee to carry out the terms of poorly conceived trusts. For example, the Barnes Foundation ran out of the money necessary to fulfill the stated intention of the benefactor, who wanted his art collection preserved forever, because he didn’t allow his trustees to make changes in regard to how the art was displayed.
 | | "Given the wealth
of information on
the Internet,
I often wonder if most
of what my industry promulgates isn’t
just hype." |
The Barnes house outside Philadelphia is chock full of Expressionist paintings. Barnes did not provide for the possibility that insurance, security, display and maintenance costs would suck up the relatively small amount of liquid funds he left. Because the benefactor’s wishes were poorly structured, the trustees have had to struggle, and the public is unable to properly enjoy the priceless art. In this case, the benefactor’s wishes were counterproductive to his long-term goals for the artwork.
Trustees have to look at the true intent of the benefactor, and not
necessarily hew word-for-word to the specific language that was used at the time. If Barnes had had good advice and the foresight to give his trustees the ability to carry out his intent that the collection be handled in such a way that the greatest number of people could benefit from it, everyone’s interests would have been better served.
The Barnes trustees had to spend millions of dollars in legal fees to ask for help from the courts, which are empowered by law to help trustees when there is a conflict between a benefactor’s intent and the original language in the document.
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