Court of Appeals hears Stevenson dispute over offsets, valuation of Monnex and Bell Canyon funds

The Utah Court of Appeals heard oral argument in Stevenson v. Stevenson over whether the trial court misapplied Utah property-division principles when it declined to give an offset for marital expenses paid from funds traced to an account called Monnex and when it treated ongoing KMK rental revenues under a 2019 stipulation.

Julie Nelson, counsel for appellant Carrie Stevenson, told the panel: "This case should be a straight shot. Carrie maintained the marital estate. Shauna didn't." Nelson argued that Carrie paid taxes, insurance and repairs that the trial court failed to account for because it treated the funds incorrectly in its valuation and distribution calculations.

Nelson said the dispute turns on an order-of-operations question: whether certain Bell Canyon expenses should have been deducted from the Monnex corpus before dividing that asset in half. She pointed to a trial-court factual finding that the Monnex account had a value of about $197,000 at separation and to the court’s later calculation that identified $171,003.71 in expenses. Nelson told the court those expenses were paid from the Monnex/Marital corpus and that the trial court failed to reconcile the credits so that Carrie bore the burden of roughly $172,000 in expenditures while Shauna received a full credit for her half.

Kristen Kibberts, counsel for appellee Shawna Stevenson, countered that once Monnex dollars were transferred into KMK or other accounts they "lost their identity," and that the appellant had not proven a dollar-for-dollar tracing or reliable accounting to support an offset. "Offsets are not presumed. They have to be proved with reliable proof," Kibberts told the court, arguing the QuickBooks and accounting evidence were insufficiently reliable to support the offset Nelson seeks.

Both sides agreed the Bell Canyon expenses at issue were marital in nature, but they disagreed about whether the correct remedy was a mathematical reconciliation (deducting expenses first, then dividing) or to treat the transfers and ongoing KMK operations as integrated such that the trial court's division was permissible. The panel repeatedly probed whether the Monnex corpus had been treated as halved at the time expenses were paid, and whether the accounting and order in which the trial court applied credits changed the end result.

Nelson said the trial court's reconciliation left line items showing one-half of Monnex as $98,792.25 for each party even though, she argued, Carrie had effectively received far less because he had already expended much of the Monnex funds on Bell Canyon. She asked for a remand so the district court could identify and credit the specific "hard expenses" — insurance, taxes, bond payments and other outlays — that she says were paid from marital funds and not credited to Carrie. Nelson limited her appeal, she said, to certain enumerated expenses (for example, insurance entries and bonds) and not to other categories the trial court rejected as inadequately proven, such as a requested salary and a 5% management fee, which the appellant is not appealing.

Kibberts acknowledged some of the trial-court findings but urged that the record shows commingling and accounting issues that made tracing Monnex dollars to Bell Canyon problematic. She told the court that KMK operating revenues and expenses, transfers into and out of a Chase account, and personal withdrawals created a tracing problem that the trial court reasonably resolved against an offset claim.

The panel also questioned two specific distribution questions: whether a June 30, 2020 payment should count as the July distribution (appellant says it should) and whether a March 1, 2021 check was actually paid (the parties dispute this). Counsel generally agreed that the June/July payment is shown in the exhibits and could be corrected without additional factfinding; the March 1, 2021 payment remains a contested factual question supported by conflicting evidence in the record.

Throughout argument the judges indicated a narrow remedial path if they found legal error: either correct discrete calculations (for example, the June/July payment) or remand to the district court to compute post-"here we go" reconciliations and to identify which of the roughly $171,003.71 in expenses were properly charged and when. The court noted uncertainty about whether a reconfiguration of line items (for example, reducing each party’s Monnex share from $98,792 to a much smaller figure after expenses are deducted) would change the ultimate split or would be harmless because both parties’ numbers would shift.

The panel took the case under advisement and said it would issue an opinion in due course.