How Do Creditors Find Out About About Bankruptcy Filings?
August 19, 2007
You’ve heard it all before - a creditor continues to send dunning notices to a debtor after the filing of a bankruptcy case. You call to notify of the bankruptcy case information and are told that they never got notice.
Another case of a misplaced court notice, or stonewalling?
You guessed it, folks - you’re being stonewalled. The problem, however, is that most bankruptcy courts don’t know it, either. They take sides with the creditor or debt collector without any further inquiry.
They don’t know about Banko. Or Banko’s new cousin, Notify Solutions.
Banko, offered by our friends as Lexis-Nexis, consolidates and updates bankruptcy cases daily from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Banko automatically supplies comprehensive, timely bankruptcy data to subscribers. That’s right, Banko does this all automatically.
Banko’s national bankruptcy database contains complete information on all bankruptcy filings, discharges, dismissals and conversions in the United States. Banko® gathers complete bankruptcy information from all Federal Bankruptcy Districts daily and then pushes that information to the debt collector into a single bankruptcy database. Each bankruptcy filed is tracked on a case-by-case basis in order to collect all filings, 341 dates, discharges, dismissals and conversions. And the information always contains the debtor’s name, address and social security number.
This week Banko got competition from First Data Corp., an electronic transaction processor serving over 1,900 cards issuers and 5 million merchants. The Notify Solutions product compiles public records from 7,000 federal, county and local courthouses nationwide in addition Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bankruptcy database is updated daily and allows users to remove the account from their collections efforts and stop all mailings and other attempts to communicate with the account.
So next time a creditor takes action post-filing (or worse, post-discharge) don’t take their word for it that they made an innocent mistake - chances are, they knew about the bankruptcy filing before the trustee was assigned.
And when there is a willful and intentional violation of the automatic stay or discharge order, there is a cause of action for damages and legal fees.
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Although I no longer practice in this area, I recall from the many programs attende in preparation for the 2005 act, that the creditors were suposed to set up a mailing list for notice of bankruptcy, was this not done?