let's talk trustees.

[itsladyliberty]

i know the basic job of a trustee in a bankruptcy case but beyond that, i'm a little confused. US trustees are government employees but district trustees are not? is this correct? if so, who employs the trustees and how are they compensated?

also, what rights do they have as far as obtaining or verifying information? can they pull credit reports or research particular debts by going straight to the creditor? it seems to me with the amount of information debtors are asked to provide to the trustee, they don't have much power in obtaining information. asking purely out of curiosity, not because we're hiding anything -- in fact, i've already reached the far corners of my filing cabinet and pulled out every piece of tax, income and spending documentation relevant to our case.

also, to what extent is the trustee a resource to the debtor? for example, if i have a simple question about the 341 meeting or a piece of correspondence from the trustee's office (if i was unclear on the number of previous tax returns he is asking for, etc) is that something i could call the trustee directly about? or is that sort of frowned upon? we're filing pro se.

also, perhaps i'm just old school but it made me laugh that my trustee is on facebook and myspace.

[itsladyliberty]

one more question -- on PACER it shows the name and address of the trustee assigned to my case, and below that it lists "US Trustee" with the address for the US Trustee office. We live in a city with a US Trustee office that, as i understand, serves quite a large area.

does this mean a US Trustee is assigned to our case? I had a previous bk and looked back at our case summary and saw that it had the same information, but we never had any interaction with the US Trustee during that process.

really hoping the US Trustee isn't involved. sounds scary! we haven't got anything to hide, we're nowhere NEAR the means income (about 1/4 of our state limit, in fact) and there aren't any flags on our case that would indicate any investigation of fraud or anything.

little paranoid now, LOL.

[dingdong]

I believe all cases have the applicable office of the US Trustee listed. Mine does, my aunts now discharged case does and so did every other case I looked at while researching the laws.

I don't believe it is anything to worry about, just standard BK procedure.

[ready2puke]

The trustee gets 10% of whatever he can get from you/us...the rest goes to creditor. So when he/she see some juicey assets, they start to lick their chops...lol

[itsladyliberty]

The trustee gets 10% of whatever he can get from you/us...the rest goes to creditor. So when he/she see some juicey assets, they start to lick their chops...lol

what about no asset cases? they don't make anything on those or what? if so, our trustee is gonna hate us.

[StartingOver08]

ready2puke;228477]The trustee gets 10% of whatever he can get from you/us...the rest goes to creditor. So when he/she see some juicey assets, they start to lick their chops...lol[/B]

So true! I am CH 7 BK, no asset, married filing alone. I had both the panel trustee (in person) and the US Trustee (via phone) at my 341 (Nov 3). I too supplied tons of backup paperwork including 4 yrs tax returns (corp and individual); two years bank statements, 3 yrs cc stmts, 10 yrs of real estate purchases and sales etc, etc for almost 2000 pages of documents (4 reams of copy paper! ). So much paperwork I was continued to Nov 24.

At the 341 the panel trustee pulls out a list of companies that I have either owned individually or been a partner in (apparently this list goes back to my birth!!). This list was obtained from Sunbiz - the public record corp filings. Anyway, she asked me about a company that I owned in the early 1990's (we are talking more than 15 yrs here). So what can the trustee get? I guess any public information to see if there is anything you own.

Long story short (oops - too late!): I was declared a no asset CH 7 - but not until they knew everything about me. So it was a happy ending (not discharged yet, expecting it soon). But they can go through whatever they think will generate fees for them and $$ for creditors. (BTW, don't worry about all that paperwork, my attorney's philosophy is to bury the trustee with paperwork if he thinks the Trustee is going to try to make an issue of anything.)

The Trustee usually makes $60 on a no asset case - that is why they try to do them in 3 minutes. If you have a simple case that's fine. I bet they were mad at mine because for the same $60 they had to spend a lot more time going over the documentation just to find out I had zero!