Annual Report 2008

Debt Management Plans

We recommend that:-

• The Insolvency Service and the OFT should work through the IVA Standing Committee to obtain commitments from debt-advice firms and the creditors or their agents to produce meaningful aggregate statistics on the average duration and success/failure rates of DMPs to enable debt advisers and debtors to make more informed decisions; and
• The Government should, with the help of the FSA and the Financial Reporting Council, investigate whether, as is widely believed in the debt advice sector, differences in the accounting and solvency rules or the way in which they are applied, allow creditors to reduce the extent to which they write down or defer the writing down of impaired debts covered by DMPs,