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Anyone considering Bankruptcy may have experienced fear after reading an article written in The Mail on Sunday with the headline “Bankruptcy cheats face crackdown”. But, how much of what was written was in context of the reality of Bankruptcy as it is today?

The article implied that since The Enterprise Act 2002 the rise in the number of people going bankrupt was due to them using the Bankruptcy route as a “Get out of jail free card”. The assumption being that The Enterprise Act 2002 made bankruptcy an easy option. However, the writer didn’t take into consideration the actions the DTI have taken to raise financial awareness and to ensure better advice is given regarding people’s options when faced with personal debt issues.

The article gave the impression that one of the restrictions of bankruptcy was that you could not open a bank account until you are discharged from bankruptcy. However, there are infact 40 basic bank accounts, half of which will allow an undischarged bankrupt to open an account. This in itself indicates the writer of the article is not fully aware of the effect of bankruptcy, therefore giving the impression that the article could possibly be the result of poor research.

The Enterprise Act 2002 (bought into force in April 2004) was made to give honest people a fresh start in life, which would be free from the stress of debt. Not for the purpose of encouraging people to “use insolvency as a way of shaking off creditors”. The writer implied that the provision, which allows the IP to request a restriction order on a bankrupt, is hardly used. Perhaps this is because, people who lodge petitions for bankruptcy have not gone out to get themselves into huge amounts of debt and are genuinely unable to repay their debt due to unforeseen circumstances, rather than fraud, recklessness or dishonesty.

If an Insolvency Practitioner suspects fraudulent or criminal behaviour, they will apply for a Bankruptcy Restriction Order (BRO) for the court to assess and decide what action to take.

The writer also states that “New” Government proposals due out in the next few days will make it easier for creditors to set up plans for repayments, an “Individual Voluntary Arrangement”. Individual Voluntary Arrangements (IVA’s) have infact been around since the 1986 Insolvency Act and used by employees and self employed people.

This only further questions the credibility of the writer and The Mail on Sunday for publishing such an article.

What the writer also doesn’t realise is, people who have failed IVA’s or not able to get an IVA add to the percentage of people petitioning for bankruptcy.

The worry that this article will have placed on people is not only unnecessary, but also misleading. The reduction in the terms of discharge from bankruptcy is supposed to be a positive change in The Enterprise Act 2002, not a negative one as implied in this article.

If you have sought advice, and you know you have no other option than to take the bankruptcy route then you should not be put off. “Nothing has changed”, as Simon Wiggins informed one of his posters who read the article and was concerned by it.

E-mail, or electronic mail, was one of the first social mediums available to visitors in cyber space. Developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, e-mail originally allowed users to only post mail messages to individual accounts across a single network. The supporting software was quickly circulated among the computer sites on ARPANET, a pre-Internet version of the World Wide Web that was used to connect a network of defense department computers. By 1972, e-mail was the most widely used application on the ARPANET network. Ever since, e-mail has been the most powerful and popular of all social computing software.

E-mail, or electronic mail, was one of the first social mediums available to visitors in cyber space. Developed by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, e-mail originally allowed users to only post mail messages to individual accounts across a single network. The supporting software was quickly circulated among the computer sites on ARPANET, a pre-Internet version of the World Wide Web that was used to connect a network of defense department computers. By 1972, e-mail was the most widely used application on the ARPANET network. Ever since, e-mail has been the most powerful and popular of all social computing software.

By the year 1999, the heyday of the Internet, over 610 billion e-mails were sent worldwide. E-mail can be read and sent from a network computer, across even the very slowest of modem connected web links. It is so basic to modern computing that, for almost all Internet users, it is the first thing they check when they log on to their computer. E-mail has been widely credited with fueling the surge in Internet usage as many people have sought online access first as a way to access electronic communications with friends, family and colleagues. According to statistics gathered in a study conducted by the University of California in Los Angeles, well over 80 percent of Internet users utilize e-mail at least once a day.

Despite the enduring popularity of e-mail, there have been relatively few attempts to create a map that tracks the structure and content of e-mail. Interfaces for e-mail clients are much the same today as they were a decade ago. Appropriately for a predominantly text-based form of communication, messages are stored in sorted lists and arranged in folders. And yet there is an ever increasing need for better and more efficient tools to manage the seemingly unlimited growth in the volume and importance of e-mails that many people receive on a daily basis.

The power of e-mail for one-to-one communication can easily be used for one-to-many interactions, as well as many-to-many conversations. This is achieved via the use of mailing lists, list servers, and bulletin boards. A mailing list is a one-to-many communication medium where the list owner can send a single message to every member on a list. A message can therefore be delivered to hundreds of subscribers with no extra effort.

A list server extends this concept to allow many-to-many conversations by permitting all subscribers to post messages to everyone on this list. This allows for ongoing discussions involving many participants. Bulletin boards, similarly, allow many-to-many communications between individuals. However, unlike mailing lists, messages are not redistributed to subscribers; instead, messages are posted to a central site, usually web-based, which users have to log on to in order to receive their messages.

The power of e-mail for one-to-one communication can easily be used for one-to-many interactions, as well as many-to-many conversations. This is achieved via the use of mailing lists, list servers, and bulletin boards. A mailing list is a one-to-many communication medium where the list owner can send a single message to every member on a list. A message can therefore be delivered to hundreds of subscribers with no extra effort.