Recently in Other Bankruptcy News Category

A unique alliance between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case, and historians, is set to reorganize the country’s bankruptcy records, reports the Third Branch, the blog of the Office of the U.S. Courts Office of Public Affairs.

Under the revised schedule for bankruptcy records, all bankruptcy dockets and opinions until 2009 will get sorted in all sorts of complicated ways. But the most interesting part is your chance to have a historic bankruptcy.

It might soon be possible to have online chats with a bankruptcy court, and, in fact, some bankruptcy courts are already offering the feature, reports the Third Branch, which is the monthly newsletter of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts Office of Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.

The model for having online chats with a bankruptcy court comes from retailers in the private sector, who often allow their customers to talk live with someone, just through the website. Now, bankruptcy courts in New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona are all using the feature.

The federal government is suing an insurer to try and have it pay money back to people that were defrauded in a Ponzi scheme, reports the Associated Press.

The suit is against Securities Investor Protection Corp. (SIPC), which is an industry-funded fund, whose job is to protect customers of failed brokerage firms. The SEC has never before sued SIPC.

The largest municipal bankruptcy in America, occurring in Jefferson County in Alabama, has created a lot of soul searching in Atlanta, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jefferson County in Alabama, which is home to Birmingham, apparently put a lot of stock in risky swap agreement and variable interest bonds. These now make up nearly three-quarters of the $4 billion in the county's liabilities.

A sewer bond refinancing played a big part in Jefferson County's municipal bankruptcy, reports ABC. Jefferson County was so broke that its bridges weren't fixed and as a result school buses took enormous detours to avoid them, racking up millions of yearly debt. The Jefferson County Chapter 9 bankruptcy was an inevitable result.

The topic of bankruptcy is associated with financial collapse, but sometimes there is good news in the bankruptcy world. It turns out that over the past year, bankruptcy filings declined by 8%, reports the U.S. Courts website.

Bankruptcy cases, which are filed under federal law and not state law, totaled less than 1.5 million for the current fiscal year. Filings were particularly down in the fourth quarters of the judicial fiscal year, with 15 percent fewer filings than in the same three-month period in 2010, reports the press release.

FindLaw’s Atlanta Bankruptcy Law Blog discusses many different types of bankruptcies. These include Chapter 11 (for companies), as well as Chapter 7 liquidation, and Chapter 13 repayment.

However, one of the unknown cousins of the various bankruptcies is the Chapter 12 bankruptcy.

Many people that followed former baseball player Lenny Dykstra's arrest, as discussed by Atlanta Bankruptcy Law News, noticed that one of the things that landed him in hot water was an allegation of bankruptcy fraud.

And while reading about Lenny Dykstra's arrest makes for a good water cooler topic, a more useful take-away from any similar story is to learn "what is bankruptcy fraud?" So that you may not, accidentally or on purpose, end up doing something similar.

Here, then, are some examples of what constituted bankruptcy fraud in other cases.

Numerous parents in Clayton County are lodging complaints and expressing frustration after state officials admitted that something went wrong in the office that administers food stamps and Medicaid, reports Fox 5 Atlanta.

The basic issue is that the food stamps simply aren't there. "Me and my kids they haven't ate since this morning. I was supposed to get my food stamps yesterday and I got nothing," said a mother to Fox 5.

The same holds true for Medicaid, with individuals not getting access to their medicine. Some of those affected include cancer patients. State officials are hoping to get the matter resolved this week.

Many Atlanta residents and people throughout the state of Georgia are struggling with debt these days. It seems no part of the economy, high or low, has been spared as the state tries hard to pull itself out of the hole the recession buried it in. Case in point, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal.

Governor Deal has managed to reduce a major debt load and avoid bankruptcy, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The governor has reduced his debt by $800,000, until there is only about $1.3 million left -- and that too will go down over the next few weeks.

A parent who decides to stay at home and watch over the children while the other spouse works could face difficulties when it comes to applying for a credit card account. The New York Times reports that this is because new provisions of the Credit Card Act of 2009 require credit card companies to look at a person’s individual income rather than a family’s household income when it comes to credit card applications.

So now, a non-working spouse or stay-at-home mom won’t be able to obtain a credit card based on his or her spouse’s income. Married couples can still apply for joint credit card accounts under the new provisions of the CARD Act, but this can sometimes be inconvenient or impracticable in some situations.