Avoidance Powers in Chapter 13© – Part 6 of 6

By Henry E. Hildebrand, III, Chapter 13 Standing Trustee (Nashville, TN) One of the issues raised at the public hearings of the Commission concerned Chapter 7 trustees that would not take prompt action to abandon exempt or partially exempt assets but, would retain assets in the hope that there might be equity in the future to sell the asset for...

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland recently appointed Mary Ida Townson as the U.S. Trustee for Florida, Georgia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (Region 21). Ms. Townson assumed her duties in June and replaced Nancy Gargula, who is the U.S. Trustee in Region 10 and who had served as the interim U.S. Trustee in Region 21...

Victims of March 3rd tornadoes and severe storms in Alabama have until July 31, 2019, to file certain individual and business tax returns and make certain tax payments. The IRS is offering this relief to any Major Disaster Declaration area designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as qualifying for individual assistance. Currently, this only includes Lee County, Alabama,...

By Henry E. Hildebrand, III, Chapter 13 Standing Trustee for the Middle District of Tennessee When the wages of an insolvent spouse are deposited into the couple’s entireties account, both spouses are fraudulent transferees; wage deposits spent on non-necessary expenditures are recoverable from the joint account by determining the proportion to the overall share of wages in the account as...

By Henry E. Hildebrand, III and Sloan Hastings Section 521(a)(7) requires a chapter 7 debtor to file a statement of intention for “debts secured by the property of the estate.” The debtor must choose to (1) reaffirm the debt, (2) surrender the collateral, or (3) redeem the collateral. Reaffirming the debt contractually binds the debtor to pay the debt even...

The CFPB (Bureau), May 2, 2019, issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which proposes to raise the coverage thresholds for collecting and reporting data about closed-end mortgage loans and open-end lines of credit under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) rules. The NPRM would provide relief to smaller lenders from HMDA’s data reporting requirements, and would clarify partial exemptions...

On 6/14/19, the CFPB (Bureau) announced a settlement with Student CU Connect CUSO, LLC (CUSO), a company set up to hold and manage private loans for students at ITT Technical Institute. The Bureau filed a complaint and a proposed stipulated judgment in federal district court for the Southern District of Indiana alleging that CUSO provided substantial assistance to ITT Educational...

Abstract: Individuals with extensive debt may be granted debt relief in court. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the Danish debt relief program with data from court records linked to nationwide register data. Using event-study methods and quasi-random assignment of applicants to court trustees with varying admission rates, we show that debt relief leads to a large increase in earned income, employment, assets,...

By Pardis Akhavan, Resnik Hayes Moradi LLP (Encino, CA) The bankruptcy court in In re Ritter, 2021 WL 864092 (Bkrtcy C.D. Cal, 2021)(J. Tighe),denied debtors’ motion for an immediate discharge under Section 1328(i) ruling that Congress apparently did not intend that a chapter 13 debtor who obtains a loan modification should also receive a discharge, on that basis alone at...