Can a beneficiary force me to provide a trust accounting?

In most cases yes, and a trustee who cannot produce one is in a weak position however honestly they have acted.

In most cases, yes. A beneficiary of an irrevocable trust is generally entitled to an accounting, and where a trustee will not produce one voluntarily a court can order it.

The uncomfortable part is that honesty is not a defense to not having records. A trustee who did everything right, paid every bill properly, and simply never wrote it down is in a genuinely weak position, because the burden of showing what happened to the money sits with the person who was holding it.

An accounting is not a spreadsheet

It is a legal document with a required form. It has to show what the trust held at the start of the period, what came in, what went out, what gains and losses occurred, and what remains — with the categories the Probate Code specifies, not the ones your bank exports.

A list of transactions in date order is not an accounting. It is raw material for one.

Where records were never kept

We reconstruct them, from bank and title history, brokerage records and county filings. It can be done, and it is expensive, and it is entirely avoidable. It is routinely the largest single line item in an administration that went wrong.

Waivers, and their limits

Where every beneficiary agrees, a formal accounting can be waived, and in a straightforward family administration that is a sensible saving. Two cautions. A waiver has to come from everyone with an interest, including remainder beneficiaries who may not be in the room. And a waiver given while a beneficiary is still in the dark is worth very little if they later say they did not understand what they were giving up.

The practical answer

Keep the record as you go. A trustee who can produce a clean accounting on demand ends most disputes before they start, because the ordinary suspicion of a beneficiary who has been told nothing is met with an answer rather than with offense.