BAPCPA's New Section 109(h) Credit Counseling Requirement: Is It Having the Effect Congress Intended?

In a perfect world, Congress would immediately revise BAPCPA to clarify these points of dispute. BAPCPA contains ambiguities that have and will create difficulties for the courts, honest debtors, and creditors. The discussion set forth herein demonstrates one set of difficulties arising out of the ambiguities of BAPCPA. The courts have struggled, in the face of penalizing good-faith debtors with the BAPCPA automatic stay limitations of sections 362(c)(3) and (4), to interpret the consequences of a debtor's failure to comply with the BAPCPA credit counseling requirement of section 109(h).

The automatic.stay limitations, which were enacted to deter abusive filings by debtors, in practice have proved to harm good-faith debtors.