Lasting powers of attorney: the referral accountants forget

When people think about planning for the future, they think about what happens after they die. A lasting power of attorney addresses the harder, more immediate risk: what happens if they are alive but lose the capacity to manage their own affairs. A stroke, an accident, dementia, or a period of serious illness can leave a person unable to sign, decide, or authorise anything — and unlike a will, an LPA cannot be put in place after capacity is lost.

For your clients this is not an abstract worry. Bank accounts can be frozen, tax returns can go unsigned, property transactions stall, and family members find they have no legal authority to step in. Without a registered LPA, the only route is a lengthy and costly court application, at exactly the moment a family is least able to cope with it.

For an owner-managed business the stakes rise sharply. If a sole director or controlling shareholder loses capacity and has made no provision, the company can be paralysed. Who signs the payroll? Who authorises payments to suppliers? Who deals with the bank? The articles of association may offer no answer, and staff, customers and cashflow all suffer while the situation is untangled.

You see which of your clients carry this concentration of risk. The one-person limited company, the partnership where all the financial control sits with a single individual, the family firm where the founder still signs everything — these are the files where the absence of an LPA is a live operational threat, not merely a personal one. Flagging it is squarely within your interest in the client's continuity.

You do not need to advise on LPAs, but knowing the shape of them helps you frame the introduction. There are two: one covering property and financial affairs, and one covering health and welfare. The financial one is the one most relevant to the work you do — it lets a chosen attorney manage bank accounts, deal with tax, and handle property if the person cannot. The two are made separately, and many people who make one forget the other.

That is the extent of what you should say about the substance. The choice of attorneys, the specific powers and restrictions, the registration with the Office of the Public Guardian — all of that is qualified work for a vetted specialist to handle, not for you to advise on.

The prompts are easy to spot in the ordinary course of your work:

• An ageing client, or one who mentions a health diagnosis
• A sole director or dominant shareholder with no succession cover
• A client setting up a will — the natural moment to ask whether they have also considered an LPA
• A client caring for an elderly relative, who may need one for that relative too
• Anyone who travels frequently or spends long periods abroad

When one of these appears, the introduction is straightforward: mention that an LPA protects them while they are alive and unable to act, that it cannot be made once capacity has gone, and that you can introduce them to vetted specialists who prepare and register these documents properly.

As with any introduction, your role ends at the handover. You identify the need in general terms, you connect the client to a vetted, regulated specialist, and you let that specialist do the qualified work. You are the introducer, never the adviser, and the compliance discipline of a referral network keeps that boundary documented — consent captured, the introduction logged, and any fee-share handled transparently under the arrangement, typically a 60-70% member share.

The reason this referral gets forgotten is simply that clients rarely raise it themselves; it is not a document anyone looks forward to making. That is exactly why the accountant's prompt matters. You are often the only professional in a position to say, before a crisis, that this gap exists and can be closed. Raise it once a year with the clients who need it, hand them to a specialist, and you will have prevented a category of harm that most of your peers never think to mention.