Special Needs Fairness Act Moving Along

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed an amended version of the Special Needs Fairness Act. The next stop is the U.S. Senate.

The prominent feature of the bill is that it would allow a disabled individual to establish and fund her own special needs trust, assuming she has the competency to do so. Current federal law provides a short list of persons and entities with authority to establish such “first party” special needs trusts, and the disabled person herself is not on that list. This sadly communicates a presumption that a disabled person lacks the mental capacity to set up a trust for herself when that is certainly not the case with all disabled persons.

Click here for an online article I ran across at Chron which summarizes the legislative updates.