By the time most people call about a high-net-worth divorce, the money has already moved. Often eighteen months earlier. A business that suddenly can’t collect its receivables. A Brickell condo that quietly changed hands into a Delaware LLC. A wire to a Cayman account nobody mentioned at dinner.
The job of a divorce asset search investigator in Miami is to reconstruct what the financial affidavit leaves out, in a form your family lawyer can put in front of a judge. Here’s how that work goes, and why the timing of your first call matters more than almost anything else in the file.
Florida’s Two-Year Lookback Is Why Timing Beats Everything
Under Florida Statute 61.075, a judge can order an unequal split of marital assets when one spouse intentionally dissipates, wastes, or depletes them after the petition is filed or within the two years before it. That window sets the perimeter of the search. Money moved thirty months ago is a far harder argument.
Call before you file. Once the petition is served, the other side starts being careful. Accounts close. Phones get wiped. The accountant receives a new instruction. Everything after service happens under supervision, and supervision produces clean records that show nothing.
Mandatory disclosure under Family Law Rule 12.285 gives you a financial affidavit within 45 days of service, plus three years of tax returns, bank and brokerage statements, and loan applications. Read the loan applications first. People understate income to a divorce judge and overstate it to a lender, and the same person signed both documents inside the same eighteen months.
Where a Divorce Asset Search Investigator in Miami Looks First
South Florida wealth hides in specific places, and they aren’t the ones people picture. Florida law creates several legal parking spots that convert liquid, divisible cash into illiquid, protected, hard-to-value positions. Those conversions are the pattern worth chasing.
Start with the house. Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution protects homestead equity with no dollar cap, limited only by area to half an acre inside a municipality. A family moves down from the Northeast, puts nine million into a house in Gables Estates, and the equity becomes untouchable by creditors. It remains a marital asset in a dissolution, but the conversion changes every negotiation that follows.
Then the insurance products. Statute 222.14 exempts the cash surrender value of life insurance and the proceeds of annuity contracts from creditors. A four million dollar single-premium annuity purchased fourteen months before a filing is a pattern, not a coincidence.
Real property titled to entities is next. Miami-Dade Clerk official records show every recorded deed and mortgage. Documentary stamps are the part people forget: in Miami-Dade the deed stamp runs $0.60 per $100 of consideration, plus a $0.45 surtax per $100 on anything other than a single-family residence. So even when a deed recites “$10 and other good and valuable consideration,” the tax paid on the face of the recording backs out what was actually paid.
Boats and aircraft are barely hidden at all. Vessels over five net tons show up in the Coast Guard documentation database, smaller ones in Florida DHSMV records, and a 62-foot sportfish on a slip lease at Miami Beach Marina generates a paper trail with a marina, an insurer, and a captain. Aircraft sit in the FAA registry under an N-number.
Crypto used to be the hard one. The Form 1040 digital asset question and, starting with 2025 transactions, broker-issued Form 1099-DA have made the tax return more useful than it was three years ago. Offshore accounts leave similar fingerprints. FinCEN Form 114 is required once foreign accounts aggregate over $10,000, Form 8938 attaches to the return, and Schedule B Part III asks directly about a financial interest in a foreign account. People who won’t lie to a judge have frequently already answered that question honestly and forgotten they did.
On the business side, the moves are old and repetitive. Invoicing gets deferred until after the final judgment. A cousin receives a “loan.” A consultant nobody has met appears on payroll. The company overpays estimated taxes to generate a refund that arrives after the divorce closes.
Piercing Shell Companies When the Registry Won’t Help
Florida LLC filings list managers and a registered agent, not members. Someone can own a six million dollar Coconut Grove property through an entity whose only named human is a lawyer downtown. Piercing shell companies takes records that sit outside the corporate registry.
The federal beneficial ownership registry looked like it would solve this. Then FinCEN’s March 2025 interim final rule pulled U.S. domestic companies out of the reporting requirement, leaving only foreign entities registered to do business here. Investigators had that tool for roughly a year. Confirm the current state of the rule before anyone builds a strategy on it.
What still works is unglamorous. Registered agent overlap across a cluster of entities. The same suite number on six filings. Entities formed on the same day by the same filer. Mortgage documents, which name a signing member because lenders insist on one. Notary and witness names on a warranty deed, which are usually the paralegal at the firm that closed every deal the subject ever did. Building permits through Miami-Dade Regulatory and Economic Resources, where the owner-applicant on a $600,000 renovation is a person with a signature and a phone number.
Where Our Work Ends and Forensic Accounting Begins
A forensic accountant reconstructs numbers from documents. We produce the documents and the field verification a spreadsheet can’t generate. The two roles overlap on lifestyle analysis, and both should be working from the same file from day one.
The accountant runs the net worth method, traces commingled funds, values the closely held business, and builds the sources-and-uses picture that shows spending exceeding reported income. Our forensic accounting support is the input side: locating the institutions and entities worth subpoenaing, confirming who actually lives at the address on a deed, photographing what’s in the driveway, verifying that a business at a leased address is operating rather than a mail drop, and identifying the third party a transfer went to.
One line we don’t cross. Pretexting a financial institution for account information is a federal crime under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, 15 U.S.C. 6821, and investigators have gone to prison for it. Nobody legitimate will sell you account numbers and balances. What a lawful asset investigation gives your lawyer is a subpoena target, which accomplishes the same thing and survives a motion to strike.
Getting Findings Into Miami-Dade Family Court
The Eleventh Judicial Circuit hears Miami-Dade dissolution matters through its family division at the Lawson E. Thomas Courthouse Center. Judges there have seen manufactured suspicion often enough to be skeptical of it, so a report has to be built for a skeptical reader.
Give the lawyer three things. A list of institutions and entities worth subpoenaing. A documented chain showing how each one was identified, record by record. And a clear statement of what remains unverified. Overstating a finding damages the case more than never finding it, because opposing counsel only has to break one link to make a judge distrust the rest.
Frame the argument around the standard the court actually applies. Equitable distribution in Florida starts from a presumption that marital assets get split equally, and the presumption moves when there’s evidence. So the argument isn’t that he’s hiding money. It’s that these specific assets are missing from the affidavit, here is the record establishing they exist, and here is the transfer that occurred inside the statutory window.
Call a Divorce Asset Search Investigator in Miami Before You File
We’ve handled asset, background, and litigation support work for South Florida attorneys and their clients since 1985, out of our office in Coral Gables, across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. If a related surveillance question is part of the same file, we handle that too.
Call (305) 278-8700 for a confidential assessment. If you’re thinking about filing, call first. The two-year window is already running.
Travis Wasser is a licensed Florida investigator and the owner of Wasser Investigations Inc., Florida Agency #A3200002. He is a summa cum laude criminal justice graduate of Florida International University, a member of the Florida Association of Licensed Investigators, and the second generation to run the agency his father founded in 1985. Nothing here is legal, tax, or accounting advice.