Bankruptcy: Judiciary Should Take Further Steps to Make Bankruptcy Data More Accessible
Highlights
There have been long-standing questions about a lack of comprehensive and reliable information on consumer bankruptcies. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (Bankruptcy Reform Act) required the federal judiciary's Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC) to collect and report certain additional bankruptcy statistics and required the U.S. Trustee Program, which oversees bankruptcy case administration, to develop uniform final reports that provide certain specified data about each case. GAO was asked to examine the (1) availability and accessibility of data from the personal bankruptcy system and (2) potential benefits and limitations of the new data requirements of the Bankruptcy Reform Act in addressing these issues. GAO examined bankruptcy data systems and obtained documentation and interviewed staff from AOUSC, bankruptcy courts, and the Trustee Program; groups representing consumers and creditors; data providers; and academic researchers and other stakeholders.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Administrative Office of the United States Courts | To help provide additional information on consumer bankruptcies useful to policy makers and others, the Director of AOUSC should expeditiously identify and implement--subject to appropriate privacy and security safeguards--measures to further improve public accessibility to those bankruptcy data that AOUSC already maintains in its information systems. For example, AOUSC might consider whether it would be practical to expand the search and output capability of the U.S. Party/Case Index. AOUSC also might explore appropriate options for releasing at least some of the case-level data used to generate the Bankruptcy Reform Act statistics. |
In March 2010, the AOUSC announced modifications to PACER, its electronic system that provides public online access to case and docket information from bankruptcy courts. As we recommended, the system allows for enhanced search and display capabilities of data that reside in what previously was known as the U.S. Party/Case Index. For example, the public can (1) request lists of cases for a specified date range by court type; (2) conduct searches based on chapter, discharge date and dismissal date for bankruptcy cases; and (3) choose display formats, including HTML, delimited text, and XML which can be imported to other programs for analysis.
|