Joint application for letters of administration. Am I missing something?

[TeaAndStrumpets]

It is an "excepted estate" in England, total value c 100k. Deceased was unmarried, no children, parents long dead. One other sibling deceased, they had no children. Three surviving siblings.

I am applying by post for letters of administration on behalf of the remaining three siblings. I am putting DB as first applicant, me and DSis as applicants 2 and 3. I wondered if we should prove our relationship to deceased by providing our birth certificates, but the lady on the probate helpline said no, we just all sign the declaration. We will send our sibling's birth and death certificates, nothing else. This seems too easy, how do they prevent fraud if we don't provide evidence we are related?

The main advice I got was to be careful not to write outside the boxes. She told me this several times!

BTW the phone number for the Probate Helpline has changed from the number online and on the application form, so they were hard to track down. It is now 0300 303 0648, 20 minutes to get through and they are only there 9 - 1.

Also I believe we don't need to fill in an IHT form for an excepted estate, just use the the online calculator, which says we are not liable. Will we ever be asked for proof eg house valuation, bank statement? I got very confused by out of date information on Google, but the government website is quite clear that they don't need us to supply an IHT form. I think this a recent change.

So does that sound OK, that we fill in the form, all sign it, then send it off with 1 birth cert and a death cert plus fee? I was expecting it to be more complex!

"Also I believe we don't need to fill in an IHT form for an excepted estate, just use the the online calculator, which says we are not liable."

As long as they died on or after 1st Jan 2022 then that is correct. You just provide an estimate.

"Will we ever be asked for proof eg house valuation, bank statement?"

I think this is very unlikely, unless something was very clearly fraudulent on a very large scale.
.

"This seems too easy, how do they prevent fraud if we don't provide evidence we are related?"

A very good question indeed. It's a similar situation where there is a will. In that situation all of the executors are supposed to fill in their name and address and that is it.

There are absolutely no checks to ensure that this is actually the case.

I am aware of one situation where an executor and beneficiary of a will (he was not in contact at the time with the person who died) only found out several months later that the person had died and that the other executor had kept quiet about the death and had said that he (my friend) did not wish to be an executor and so no documentation was ever sent to him.

The whole system really is quite dodgy and very open to abuse by those people that wish to do so.

@Another2Cats Thank you for your very comprehensive explanation. I feel much more confident now. We had been quoted nearly £10000 for a solicitor to act for us, which seemed very high. Instead we have engaged him to do the will search, assets search and Gazette notice, so a bit of DIY on the form is saving us money.

The system does seem open to abuse, goodness knows what goes on!