Discharge Notification

Dolly-Rocket

Hello
Im starting my file clean-up today and i don't have a Discharge Notifciation.
Where can I get one and how much please?
thank you

dojoman

You can get one from the court you went BR for around £70, or if you have been discharged less than 3 months you can print some copies off the IS site, or you could ask your OR for a letter of confirmation. Some OR`s will send out out a letter whilst others don`t, I have also heard of some peeps being charged for this letter although I wasn`t.

dojoman

Also if you are on certain benefits, you could possibly get the court certificate free of charge.

Johnpj

I found that some companies would not mark their entries in the agency files as satisfied until they had sight of a discharge certificate from the court. Which of course is quite expensive when you can least afford it, bit like the fees for going bankrupt!!

It was not that it was a requirement, more they just wanted to treat bankrupts in such a way as to make life difficult. It is their right as they lost money.

So get a letter from your OR if it is free, but if they try and charge you for it, you would be better going for the court certificate.

Ineedaname

As long as proof of discharge is provided, i.e. print from the IS website or a letter from the OR, then they should update the files. If they insist on an official Court discharge certificate then I believe the CRAs can intervene to avoid the ex-BR being forced to pay out unecessarily.

Following the clean up thread will help make the process go as smoothly as possible.

Johnpj

This was NOT my experience. The way many companies reacted to the bankruptcy varied wildly, and in very unpredictable ways.

Many stopped chasing me when I told them, others wanted proof in various ways and degrees, whilst others continued to chase even afterwards, even though the law is very clear.

This then continued when I was clearing up my credit files, but became much worse, even individual people in the same company acted differently. The agencies can and do intervene, but they do make it quite clear that the ultimate choice lays with the actual company itself with whom you had the agreement. I would say that the hardest part of bankruptcy was the actual clean up of the credit file. For example, things would be cleaned up, only to re-appear, sometimes a year latter as another party "purchased" the debt. I even had to threaten a firm of solicitors with the information commissioner and the law society before they backed down.

You only have to obtain the certificate once, and I found it the most convincing and easiest way to halt things.

A good example was when a bailiff turned up at the door of the house I was living in during the bankruptcy and demanded to take goods. The goods were in fact the property of other people, and yes I know they are not allowed to do that, but we all know they try it on. I called the police, who specifically asked for the proof from the court, when they saw it they were happy to "ask" the person to leave. However they requested that I went and dug out my original and not a photocopy which I had on my computer.

I cannot stress enough, the agencies and the companies do not have to do anything, the "rules" they follow are only guidelines, and certainly the agencies will do nothing if the creditor company refuses to amend the information. You then have to start the formal process of raising disputes and getting an adjudication from the information commissioner.

Further every single company did something slightly different, with the dates of default, when the account ended, when it was satisfied etc etc. It wound me up beyond anything else I have experienced in my life. One very nice person in a well known catalogue company, who was the only person who was ever willing to speak to me properly on the phone said to me they do it on purpose to make things difficult.

No matter what should happen, the reality is very different, and making sure you have all the right paperwork, and all the dotted i and crossed t in order makes all the difference to your sanity if nothing else.

Ineedaname

Sorry, couldn't read all that. But it sounds like you had a bad experience.

I don't recall many members posting they had creditors insisting on an official discharge certificate, most seem to manage with a print from the IS website and/or a letter from their OR. I believe the clean up thread advises where to go next if creditors are being obstinate and a few members have had to take things further to get their files cleaned up.

So I guess your experience just isn't the norm.

dojoman

I had no problems with any of my creditors, they were all happy with the IS print out and letter that I provided. And I have just finished cleaning my files up.

Johnpj

I had many creditors, not a particularly large amount of debt, so I have many experiences to draw on. I have used the advice from these forums over the past few years, almost soley, to deal with all my bankruptcy issues, the information has been fantastic.

As I said, the way different companies handled things varied so wildly, and even when you think things had the lid on them, they re-opened sometimes after quite a large time lapse. I think the watch word is expect the unexpected and the unpredictable.

Of the 70 or so credit agreements, ranging from electricity to credit loans and mobile phones etc about 20% were fine and polite. 60% were difficult but fair. The final 20% drove me mad and strangely the same names I had problems with appear in the postings of others.

The real problem is that we all know there are guidelines, laws and fairness, but two things are worth remembering:
1) You owed them money, and the departments in those companies are small, under resourced, generally, and often full of pen pushing "jobsworths"
2) The credit reference agencies will NOT amend data almost without exception without the agreement of the company concerned. When they do, which did happen to me, the information was overwritten again a few months latter when the company did an update.

I would not say I was any worse than anyone else, judging my the experiences of others, I just had more smaller value accounts. I certainly know the names of the ones who gave me real grief!!!!

dojoman

Johnpj wrote: »

I had many creditors, not a particularly large amount of debt, so I have many experiences to draw on. I have used the advice from these forums over the past few years, almost soley, to deal with all my bankruptcy issues, the information has been fantastic.

As I said, the way different companies handled things varied so wildly, and even when you think things had the lid on them, they re-opened sometimes after quite a large time lapse. I think the watch word is expect the unexpected and the unpredictable.

Of the 70 or so credit agreements, ranging from electricity to credit loans and mobile phones etc about 20% were fine and polite. 60% were difficult but fair. The final 20% drove me mad and strangely the same names I had problems with appear in the postings of others.

The real problem is that we all know there are guidelines, laws and fairness, but two things are worth remembering:
1) You owed them money, and the departments in those companies are small, under resourced, generally, and often full of pen pushing "jobsworths"
2) The credit reference agencies will NOT amend data almost without exception without the agreement of the company concerned. When they do, which did happen to me, the information was overwritten again a few months latter when the company did an update.

I would not say I was any worse than anyone else, judging my the experiences of others, I just had more smaller value accounts. I certainly know the names of the ones who gave me real grief!!!!

Wow! are you saying you had 70 creditors?

Johnpj

dojoman wrote: »

I had no problems with any of my creditors, they were all happy with the IS print out and letter that I provided. And I have just finished cleaning my files up.

Yes I thought that, and for almost all of them that was the case, job done, no more issues.

Three companies in particular haunted me, one still today with all the negative information almost gone.

The first was where a debt got sold on, and a well known group of debt collecting solicitors put secondary defaults on my credit file and refused to remove them. This is quite common, and you can find their name popping up quite regularly on the forums.

The second was when a very well known american finance company refused to amend any details, full stop. The credit reference agency eventuallly agreed to amend the dates so they matched the dates of my bankruptcy, being the default (order) and satisfaction (discharge). Months latter they came back onto my report following a routine data update. I served a formal notice on their head office with the actual court certificate which ended the matter, and threat of the information commissioner getting involved.

The third was the bailiff covered above.

I have even had a very strange situation develop recently. I had a number of mobile phone accounts with one company. There were all readily changed on my credit file without any problems, some 4 years ago. Then after the due time, they dropped off, all gone I thought. Then only two months ago they all reappeared again on just one credit agency files. However, even stranger they were not showing as default, which is what happened to them, but live and at a previous address!!! This looked like I was running two addresses and could have caused a CIFAS warning against me. That is still ongoing, and the company say they have no idea how it happened. They are having to manually remove all the data to prevent it coming back again.

From all of the experiences I have read on here, if you have no problems cleaning up your credit file then you are lucky. If you have accounts with certain credit grantors then you will 100% have problems either because they do not know that they are doing (common) or they go out of their way to make the life of bankrupts difficult. Their names come up time and time again in connection with negative information on credit reference files.