Bankruptcy

How to annoy, upset and aggravate your bankruptcy trustee and delay your discharge ? part 4

By David Leibowitz, Illinois and Wisconsin Bankruptcy

There are so many ways you can really honk off your bankruptcy trustee.  What you really want is to be invisible to your bankruptcy trustee.  So how else can you really perturb (isn’t that a nice “p” word?) your bankruptcy trustee and foul up (isn’t that a nice “f” word?) your bankruptcy case?

A really good way to mess up your case is to fail to mention that you are a plaintiff in a great big lawsuit.  Maybe you’ve got a malpractice suit pending.  Maybe you were in a bad auto accident.  Maybe you’ve got a discrimination claim going.

What will you do when the trustee asks you “Have you seen a lawyer about any matter in the past 3 years?”  “Are you now or have you been within the past 3 years a plaintiff in any lawsuit?”

Will you tell the truth and admit that you left this out of your schedules?  Or will you lie and take your chances of being caught perjuring yourself?

A better course would be to disclose that lawsuit in the first place.  The trustee can look at the public records.  Why now assume that he or she has done so and knows the answer to the question.

False statements under oath can lead to:

• prosecution
• loss of discharge
• loss of exemptions
• total loss of the asset

It’s the worst of all worlds.  Let this be somebody else’s nightmare and not yours.

Full post as published by Bankruptcy Law Network on February 21, 2010 (boomark / email).