The Queen of Soul died with almost $1 million in uncashed checks

The Queen of Soul left behind great music and also a large amount of uncashed checks.

After a new inventory of her assets, almost $1 million dollars in uncashed checks have been found with Aretha Franklin’s estate.

The checks found were from various things, they included, $702,711.90 from Sound Exchange and the Screen Writers Guild and $285,944.27 in checks from her publishing company, Springtime Publishing, EMI, BMI, Carlin Music and Feel Good Films, according to Page Six.

Making the grand total $988,656.17 in uncashed checks.

Franklin died on August 16,2018 at the age of 76 and originally no Will was found, causing family drama over the allocation of her assets. The late singer left behind four sons who were set to split her estate evenly, but nine months after her death, that changed. Three handwritten Wills were found in her house, two from 2010 and one from 2014, according to Billboard.

The authenticity of the Wills are being reviewed by a handwriting expert. If these Wills are valid, the distribution of Franklin’s assets will completely change. Each son has also retained separate legal teams.

But this wouldn’t be the first time Franklin hadn’t cashed in checks. Checks from 2012 had to be reissued in 2016. Franklin’s son Kecalf Cunningham has already contacted a bank in regards to one of the checks found, according to Billboard.

Kecalf and his brothers appointed his cousin Sabrina Owens as the personal representative of the estate, but he has since expressed his unhappiness with her work. “It is totally unacceptable that it has taken a year for the heirs to begin find out what their mother owned on the date of her death,” Kecalf’s attorneys Charlene Glover-Hogan and Juanita Gavin Hughses wrote in a recent court motion. “To date, the heirs still do not know what was owned on Aretha Franklin’s date of death.”

Kecalf’s attorneys also claims Owens didn’t distribute an inventory of Aretha’s estate to the four heirs until six months after it was due by law. Court papers said the inventory was missing a lot of things including bank statements, tax bills, appraisals for the value of her homes and blue book values of her cars.