Isn't bankruptcy better than a PIA?

"The Personal Insolvency Practitioner believes that the debtor is unable to pay his/her debts as they fall due and the debtor’s inability to meet his/her engagements cannot be more appropriately dealt with by means of a Debt Relief Notice Process, Debt Settlement Arrangement or a Personal Insolvency Arrangement."

Can you define "more appropriate" in this context?
There is obvious ambiguity in the wording and it leaves much to interpretation.

My belief that the law was intended primarily to help the debtor not hinder him can be just as easily accommodated within the wording as your interpretation.

Is it "more appropriate" and "reasonable" to allow a debtor to go bankrupt and start again - with the certainty that bankruptcy brings - than it is to order a 5 yr PIA which will yield an extra €30,000 to creditors but which will effectively destroy that person's peace of mind for its duration (especially someone who is near retirement let's say) and could - if it fails - utterly destroy him and his family?
 
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In my experience there is a lot more going on in the background of this type of case than first meets the eye.

First of all, the difference for a debtor between pursuing one route rather than the other need not be that great and practically is
usually not that great. For example its easy to imagine that a bankrupt and a PIA client will pay the same amount from their income
each month for the benefit of creditors except that the installment order for the bankrupt will stop one or two years earlier. If the PIA fails due to sickness or redundancy, this shouldn't be much of a problem either. There is an option to go bankrupt at that point if that is necessary and discharge will follow within one year.

In 99% of cases that I have experienced where the debtor is overly enthusiastic about bankruptcy, the real issue and concern from the debtor's standpoint relates to future expected windfalls such as an inheritance, or retirement gratuity or redundancy payment or pension lump sum or whatever it may be. I dont wish to be unkind to the OP by suggesting this but I do wonder if, like others, this is where his real worry stems from. By going bankrupt sooner rather than later the debtor tries to ring fence future windfalls from creditors. I don't think the legislation should be altered to facilitate this type of scenario or other self-serving interests.

I have nothing further to offer to this discussion
 
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Dr.Debt said:
There is an option to go bankrupt at that point if that is necessary and discharge will follow within one year.
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I appreciate you've said you will add nothing further but do you know if there would be would be a further 3 year Income Payment order from the point of going bankrupt irrespective of how many years were already spent in the PIA arrangement?
It's the key issue in all this.
 
If your PIA breaks down because you no longer have the income to pay it, neither will you have income to pay a bankruptcy installment order so there's no issue with that at all and definitely not a key issue as you say. Look, Id recommend you talk to a PIP and find out a bit more about it. There really isnt much more to be said.
 
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