maximmm99

One final note: If you don't give your council a forwarding address in your new country, they don't have any means of contacting you in the first place so if they don't know where you are, how do they recover against you? Have you thought about this fact or am I just being naive again?

kar-kier

Credit card/ loans companies can manage to track you down if you don't leave an address, one would assume that a council (a branch of local government) would be able to access this info too!

maximmm99

No, they have surprisingly little access to information, believe me. Bailiffs often do a credit check but that again is limited to the UK only.
It's one of the things that made me hate the whole industry. Housing and Council Tax Benefit assessors for example have no legal access to a person's income from sources such as Disability payments and Child Support. This means that you just have to wait for a person to make a mistake before you can start to sort out what they should actually be receiving, whether it be a cheque or a debt. Incidentally, Welfare Benefit debt is NOT to be trifled with and it IS something you should pay off rather than leave festering. Again, these debts do get written off after a while but only after the various criminal proceedings have been exhausted. Getting a record for Benefit Fraud will surely stop you getting a PR visa for most countries. Also, if you ever should reappear, the debt will get re-raised anyway so you can't really escape.

kar-kier

Thanks for that info!

maximmm99

I have to add here that the only reason I left a debt was in protest at the Council's decision to penalise me because my house stayed empty for more than 6 months whilst waiting to sell. Most Councils would give you a 6 month full exemption followed by a 50% discount because the property is unoccupied and empty of furniture. However my council had made the decision locally to disregard the England-wide policy of giving the 50% discount and instead charged me the full occupancy 100% rate. If they'd have charged me the reasonable 50% charge, I'd have paid it but as they didn't I refused to pay. That was going on 3 years ago and that's the last I've heard of it. The debt will now have been safely written off and that's the end of it.

maximmm99

Kar-kier - no problems. It's surprising when you actually find out how inefficient and ineffective the whole Council Tax scheme is, especially in terms of debt recovery. As the debts are Local Authority (Civil) debts, the whole process is pretty toothless and is especially so in terms of ex-pat debts. Benefits are the same too though again you really don't want to end up with action being taken against you that results from incurring a debt to central Government as that debt is a criminal matter and not just pissy civil stuff.

sr71

Generally you'll find that credit card companies and banks do absolutely nothing, it is the debt recovery agencies that do all the underhand detective work.

Usually the process follows something like this (very roughly)

-Bank tries a few letters.
-Bank passes on to debt collection agent (maybe even a department of the bank under a different trading name)
-When this recovery fails after a few letters it is passed back to the bank, occasionally multiple agents may be used.
-Bank writes off the debt, packages the bad debts up and sells them at a huge discount to debt recovery companies (like a 20,000 debt being sold for 2,000 etc)
-Debt recovery company pursues the debt, sometime negotiating the amount down.

So while morally you should pay your debts, I personally don't have a problem with people that genuinely can't pay and leave the country, especially once the debts have got to the stage of being sold to dodgy debt recovery companies. (and these people will definitely not make people bankrupt)

I had a friend who left a $20,000 credit card debt in Australia that he couldn't pay, he was contacted several years later in the UK by some outfit and he eventually settled in full for $4,000 - so you can imagine what they bought it for as they are still making a profit on this.

Deancm

After several years, wouldn't the statute of limitations on the debt have expired by then? I think in Australia it is 6 years.

sr71

Several means more than 2, so could be 3,4,5 etc.

paulry

They certainly made a tidy profit. Despatches (Channel 4) recently uncovered debt recovery agencies and their underhand tactics. Apparently they buy the debt for anything between 6p and 17p in the pound - dependant on how old the debt is.

Deancm

Yes, I know what several means. It could also mean 6, 7, 8 but not much more. In the example you stated using 'couple' or 'few' years might be more accurate and not as ambiguous.

hollykimalan

How did we get on to the
"few", "some","several","couple" debate?
That old chestnut!
Did I miss something?
HKA
x

Budawang

Ultimately the consumer (i.e. all of us) foots the bill for those people who don't pay their debts. The more people that do this, the more the banks will pay for their insurance and that cost will passed on to everyone.

It's not ethical to walk away from your debts, unless you really can't pay them back.

Centurion

Except tow your car away if its not on finance. Although a vehicle may be worth 100s of times more than the warrant amount, it can be seized and later sold for non payment if at the time it was the only item available for seizure. A Bailiff can request the registered keeper information from the DVLA and then just HPI check it for finance.

Incidentally there are Certificated Bailiffs who act for such things as commercial rent (which needs no court action at all), magistrates court fines & council tax liability orders. These are private bailiffs usually working for a firm.

The County Court Bailiffs work directly for the Court enforcing CCJs and then there is the High Court Sheriff etc.

Interestingly, each type of debt carries with it a different set of enforcement restrictions and so on. Never piss off a bailiff who is acting for the taxman

Kalenge

Well said. Some people think that it's the so-called greedy organisations that suffer, but it's the man in the street. The millions of pounds of bad debt are simply recovered by charging us higher prices, higher insurance, and higher bank charges.

Everyone pays the price for the greed/dishonesty/frivolity of the unscrupulous few.