Is it really too much to ask for?
As I’m sure we all appreciate, some businesses do fail. Being a stakeholder in an insolvency administration is an unfortunate part of doing business. However, through my experiences I have learned, what makes the insolvency process somewhat more palatable to stakeholders is to have easy access to up to date and accurate information.
At Worrells we have always prided ourselves on providing clear, accurate, up to date and relevant information to stakeholders, not just in our statutory reporting, but more so through our website file information and email subscription facility.
My question is, are we ahead of what other practitioners offer to stakeholders? I believe so. I also believe we deliver what should be expected of all insolvency practitioners in providing current and relevant information. Worrells sets the benchmark that others should be expected to achieve in dealing with stakeholders.
Stakeholders should be able to see what time is being spent on a file (i.e. what professional time is being charged to a file), what the receipts and payments are, what documents have been prepared, and access to copies of those documents when it is convenient to them, not when it is convenient to the insolvency practitioner to 'disclose' them. The very term stakeholder means they have a stake in what is happening. So why isn't such information and documents freely available?
Stakeholders have a right to relevant information on any file, and if unavailable, they have the right to ask why. And if it is not automatically available through a low cost mechanism such as a secure website, they should be asking why. Stakeholders shouldn't have to pay a professional an hourly rate to get information that could be made available online automatically.
Business owners have to make decisions everyday based on (hopefully) reliable and accurate information available. It shouldn't be any different in an insolvency administration.