One Year Bankruptcy The Bankruptcy Amendment (Enterprise Incentives) Bill 2017 came before the Senate in late August 2018 and the legislation is now a step closer to becoming effective law. Amongst many things contained in the Bill, some highlights are to: provide for an automatic discharge after one year of bankruptcy, and related transitional ar...
Announcement of Two Key Promotions The Directors of Heard Phillips are delighted to announce the promotion of Alberto Comin to Associate Director and Chris Moody to Manager effective from 1 July. Alberto’s promotion is in recognition of his outstanding leadership and technical understanding of insolvency and restructuring issues. Over the past 12 ...
NOCLAR and the Insolvency Practitioner NOCLAR is the widely used abbreviation referring to non-compliance with laws and regulations. The International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (IESBA) has released an amending standard to the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants to redefine the accountants’ role when laws or regulations are brok...
Government Getting Serious on Super “It is not acceptable for people not to be paid their superannuation entitlements.” The above is a quote from the January 2018 media release of the Honourable Kelly O’Dwyer MP as she introduced draft legislation intended to create severe penalties for the failure to pay employee superannuation on time. The legisl...
AskInsolvency is a simple self-assessment toolkit for directors who are worried about whether their ...
Safe Harbour … what does it mean? In our newsletter last quarter, we introduced the concept of safe harbour and what it was aimed to achieve. The legislation giving effect to safe harbour has now been introduced as Section 588GA of the Corporations Act 2001 (“Act”). From discussions we have had with accountants and other advisors following the intr...
Genuine restructuring efforts to be rewarded by Safe Harbour Reforms – A new era in restructuring In September 2017 legislation passed through Parliament that is designed to give Australian companies a better fighting chance at avoiding insolvency and formal external administration by offering directors some relief from the harsh insolvent trading ...
Valuable restructuring law reform being considered On 28 March 2017, the Australian Government released an exposure draft of legislation dealing with two key areas of insolvency and restructuring law reform. The legislation may come into effect by early next year. First, the proposed legislation provides directors of a company with a safe harbour f...
Unfair Preferences and Insolvency Most readers will be aware of the corporate insolvency focus of our practice but we are increasingly being engaged for our expert accountant skills in litigation and commercial matters. Our unique perspective of unfair preference and other voidable transaction claims, and of insolvency generally, gives us the abili...
Advice that costs you nothing We are regularly in discussions with businesses and advisers to businesses about options and issues for directors to consider when their businesses are struggling with cash flow and are under pressure from creditors. The regularity of our involvement in these discussions and the broadness of industries that we consider...
Director Penalty Notice Alert Most readers will be familiar with the Director Penalty Notice (“DPN”) regime enforced by the ATO, however we are seeing an increased number of DPN’s issued after a company has entered external administration that are catching directors by surprise. The ATO comment on their web site that … “we are likely to issue a dir...
Employee Entitlements For in excess of 10 years, employees have had the benefit of recourse to a Government safety net to ensure the payment of employee entitlements in the event of the insolvency of their employer. Over the years the scheme, now known as Fair Entitlements Guarantee (“FEG”), has been amended and modified. From July 2016 there are f...
Guidance on director duties and insolvent trading The Federal Court in the case of Smith v Boné, in the matter of ACN 002 864 002 Pty Ltd (in liq) [2015] FCA 319 has provided some fresh judicial guidance on what can be considered the proper exercise of director duties as companies approach the point of insolvency. The facts of this case are typical...
Insolvency laws should encourage rehabilitation Readers of our Client Update will likely be familiar with the press articles written over the past few years concerning enquiries into the conduct of certain liquidators, the effectiveness of the Australian insolvency regime and most recently, the parliamentary enquiry into the impairment of customer ...
Heard Phillips expands We open this quarter’s newsletter with the fantastic news that our firm, started by Andrew and Anthony eight years ago, has proudly taken the next step in its growth path. We are pleased to announce that on 1 September, long term employee and associate director Mark Lieberenz became an equity director in our firm. Mark has a ...