My name is Ira Smith, President of
Ira Smith Trustee & Receiver Inc.
We hope that you and your entire family are remaining safe, healthy and secure
during this coronavirus pandemic. Ira Smith Trustee & Receiver Inc. remains fully operational.
Both Brandon Smith and myself
are holding all meetings by telephone or video and we are available to answer any
questions you may have either about this Brandon Blog or anything else at all.
So give us a phone call, shoot us a message.
We would love to hear from you.
Today's Brandon Blog is about an unreported Ontario court decision.
The blog is titled Trustee In Bankruptcy, Ontario: The Best Modern Rules
For Getting Paid. So I hope you can watch until the end
of this video because I know you will get value from it.
This unreported Ontario case was actually the subject matter of a webinar
that Brandon and I attended earlier this week. The webinar was presented
to the insolvency community in Ontario by our Provincial association.
There were three presenters;
1 licensed insolvency Trustee and two insolvency lawyers.
It turns out that the Trustee was actually the Trustee in this case.
What this case was about was the Trustee going for taxation
having administered a personal Division 1 proposal
restructuring under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act.
This was about a real estate agent who was
insolvent, owed a huge debt to Canada Revenue Agency and debts
to others and needed to do a debt settlement plan.
The person had too much debt to do
a consumer proposal, so they did a Division 1 proposal.
The Trustee then went to get his accounts
taxed and as you'll see in the blog below, the Trustee had difficulty.
Normally, it is over-the-counter taxation.
We upload documents to the court
electronically and if there are no issues or problems, the Associate Justice
reviews the situation, makes the taxation order and sends it off to the Trustee.
If there are any issues,
the Associated Justice will make an endorsement and ask questions
in order to have fuller information.
In this case, the Associate Justice asked
questions, wasn't happy with the answers and then requested a video conference
taxation hearing after notice being sent by the Trustee to the Office
of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy as well as to all the creditors.
Neither the creditors nor
the Superintendent of Bankruptcy opposed the taxation, but the court was not
satisfied that the Trustee had submitted sufficient information
to prove that it deserved all of the fees it was asking for.
Most importantly,
the Trustee did not submit any time dockets because they did not have any.
The reason they didn't have any was
because in the proposal itself it gave the number of
the fee that the Trustee was going to charge and therefore the Trustee felt
it was a fixed fee and they did not need to keep time dockets.
Unfortunately, the court felt otherwise.
The court reduced the Trustee's fee.
The Trustee was not happy and appealed the Associate Justice's decision to a judge
on the Commercial List. The judge dismissed the appeal
affirming the decision of the Associate Justice.
All of the details are in the blog below.
Brandon first goes through the different
types of files a licensed insolvency trustee could administer
which ones, the consumer files, have a fixed fee tariff
and which ones being
all the others that do not have a fixed fee and therefore require the Trustee
to keep accurate and detailed time dockets to prove the work done,
the value of the work in order to get through
successfully a taxation. So I hope you can read the entire blog
below because I know you will get value from it.
Again, the Ira Smith team hopes that you
and your entire family are remaining safe, healthy, and secure during this
coronavirus pandemic Ira Smith Trustee & Receiver Inc. continues to be fully operational.
Both Brandon Smith and myself are answering all questions, holding all
meetings either by telephone or video meeting.
So give us a phone call.
Shoot us a message we would love to hear from you.