Probate work and AML risk: a solicitor's guide

Probate sits in an odd blind spot for AML compliance. The person whose wealth is at the centre of the file is deceased, the money often moves in one large, entirely lawful tranche, and the work feels administrative rather than transactional. That is precisely why probate deserves deliberate AML thinking: estates can carry decades of unexplained accumulation, beneficiaries you have never met, and assets in jurisdictions you know nothing about. If you are a solicitor supervised by the Law Society of Ireland, your obligations under the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010 apply to this work today — and from 10 July 2027 the EU's AML Regulation (the AMLR, Regulation (EU) 2024/1624) becomes the directly applicable rulebook.

Here is a practical way to think about probate risk before that date arrives.

Who is the client in a probate matter?

The first CDD question in probate is also the most commonly fudged one. Your client is normally the personal representative — the executor named in the will or the administrator extracting a grant — not the deceased and not the beneficiaries. That is where identification and verification effort starts: identify and verify the executor or administrator as you would any client, and record the basis on which they act.

But the file does not end there. A risk-based approach means understanding the estate itself: what the assets are, roughly how they were accumulated, and who ultimately receives them. You are not investigating the deceased's life; you are satisfying yourself that nothing about the estate, its history or its distribution gives grounds for suspicion.

Where does the money-laundering risk actually sit in an estate?

Think of probate risk in three layers:

• The deceased's wealth. Most estates are the unremarkable product of a lifetime of work, property and savings. Occasionally, an estate contains wealth with no visible explanation — significant cash holdings, assets inconsistent with any known occupation, or property acquired through opaque structures. Age and death do not launder money; funds that were criminal in origin remain so in an estate.
• The assets and where they are. Foreign property, accounts in multiple jurisdictions, crypto-assets, or interests in private companies all raise the effort needed to understand what you are administering. Connections to countries on the EU's high-risk third-country list push a matter towards enhanced due diligence.
• The people receiving it. Beneficiaries should be identified as distributions approach, and screening matters: a beneficiary who is a politically exposed person, or who is subject to financial sanctions, changes how the distribution must be handled. So does a beneficiary who asks for funds to be redirected to a third party or an unconnected account.

A purely hypothetical illustration: a practice is instructed by an executor on an estate that includes a valuable Dublin property, a foreign bank account the family cannot explain, and an instruction to pay one beneficiary's share to a company account abroad. None of these facts is damning alone. Together, they are exactly the pattern that should reach the MLRO before any money moves.

What does the AMLR change for probate practice?

The AMLR keeps the risk-based architecture Irish solicitors know, but several changes touch probate files directly:

• Thresholds move. CDD for occasional transactions triggers at €10,000 instead of €15,000, and occasional cash transactions of €3,000 or more trigger limited CDD. An EU-wide €10,000 cap on cash in commercial transactions also applies — relevant if anyone proposes settling estate liabilities or purchases in cash.
• Beneficial ownership is harmonised. Where estate assets include companies, the 25% or more test (direct or indirect) applies EU-wide, and your existing duty to obtain an extract from the Register of Beneficial Ownership before a new business relationship with a corporate client continues.
• High-net-worth EDD. Enhanced due diligence applies to high-net-worth relationships where both limbs of a cumulative test are met: you handle assets of €5m or more for a client whose total wealth is €50m or more. Large estate administrations can bring a practice near this territory, so know the test.
• Roles and records. The AMLR prescribes a board-level compliance manager and a compliance officer of sufficiently high standing, and requires records to be kept for 5 years and then deleted.

Reporting mechanics stay Irish: Suspicious Transaction Reports remain dual-reported to FIU Ireland via the goAML portal and to the Revenue Commissioners via ROS.

How much source-of-funds work is enough?

Proportionality is the honest answer. For a routine estate — family home, pension, deposit accounts, a will professionally drafted years ago — identifying the personal representative and understanding the estate from the papers you already hold is usually the bulk of the work. Escalate the effort when the file gives you a reason: unexplained assets, opaque structures, high-risk jurisdictions, urgency without explanation, or distribution requests that make no practical sense. Record the reasoning either way. The file that says "considered, low risk, because…" is worth far more in an inspection than the file that says nothing.

What to do now

1. Add a probate-specific section to your business-wide risk assessment — estates are a distinct risk picture, not a footnote to conveyancing.
2. Build a short probate CDD checklist: verify the personal representative, understand the assets, identify beneficiaries before distribution, screen for PEPs and sanctions.
3. Set escalation triggers in writing: unexplained wealth, high-risk jurisdictions, third-party payment requests.
4. Update thresholds in your procedures to the AMLR figures before 10 July 2027.
5. Confirm your goAML and ROS registrations are current, and refresh training with probate examples.
6. Record risk-rating decisions on every estate file, including the low-risk ones.

Where CompliDesk fits

CompliDesk Ireland gives your practice a place to record exactly this — risk ratings, source-of-funds reasoning, screening results and escalation decisions — matter by matter, AMLR-ready from day one. A refreshed firm-wide risk assessment is the right starting point: see our business-wide risk assessment guide.