17.5 Death, incapacity and abandonment

Incapacity does not change ownership of an account or make it abandoned. An authorised guardian or other Person with delegated account authority may operate it for the owner, subject to the same account-type, Product Category, transfer, tax, and privacy rules that applied before the incapacity. Delegated operation does not turn the account into an estate or alter the restrictions governing it.

When the Identity System records a verified death, the owner's accounts enter estate settlement. This prevents further operation under the deceased owner's authority while allowing committed transfers, valid refunds, liabilities, and disputes to be resolved. The accounts are closed only after the applicable legal process has determined the lawful recipients and allocations and the estate transfers have been completed.

Remaining value in a G-account may pass to a G-account nominated by a Non-Citizen recipient because only a Non-Citizen may own a G-account. A Citizen instead receives that value through a B-account categorised as "gift". Remaining value in B-, R-, and C-accounts also passes to recipients through "gift" B-accounts. This identifies the transfers as inheritance rather than commerce, productive revenue, or consumption.

Estate transfers are untaxed administrative transfers. Receiving inherited value is not consumption; consumption tax applies later if the recipient uses that value for consumption. If there is no lawful recipient, the value passes to the UBI pool rather than remaining indefinitely in ownerless accounts.

Inheritance therefore does not provide a way to avoid consumption tax. The children of a wealthy capitalist may inherit accumulated value without tax at the time of transfer, but they pay the same consumption tax as anyone else whenever they use that value for consumption. Passing wealth to another generation changes its owner, not the consumption-tax boundary.

An account is not abandoned merely because it has been inactive or its owner cannot presently be contacted. It may be declared abandoned only after the constitutionally defined period has elapsed without any owner-authorised activity and after the required account-recovery and notification procedures have failed. The period should be long enough to prevent temporary absence, lost credentials, detention, illness, or incapacity from causing forfeiture.

Once an account is lawfully declared abandoned, it is closed and its entire remaining balance is transferred to the UBI pool. This administrative transfer applies to every account type, is not a commerce transaction, and is not taxable. It does not create a withdrawal route for the owner and therefore does not weaken the transfer restrictions on G-accounts.