Orange County Attorneys Discuss The Chapter 13 Section 341 Meeting in New York

The primary focus of the examination by the Chapter 13 Trustee is on the income and expenses set forth in your budget, in order to ascertain if you are devoting all of your monthly disposable income to the funding of your Chapter 13 Plan. The Chapter 13 Trustee will also ask questions about household expenses that seem unusual (either too high or too low) to him, and if any fraudulent transfers or preferential transfers are revealed in your petition or through your testimony, the Trustee will ascertain the value of the asset fraudulently or preferentially transferred, to insure that appropriate Plan payments are made to at least equal the value of the transferred asset over the life of the Plan.

The questions asked by the Chapter 13 Trustee tend not to be quite as formulaic as those asked by his Chapter 7 counterpart, but once the debtor is sworn in a series of questions similar to the following should be anticipated:

• How much have you agreed to pay your attorney for handling this case?
• How much have you paid your attorney thus far?
• Have you paid any money to your attorney subsequent to the filing of the case?
• Has your attorney asked you to pay him any money subsequent to the filing of your case?
• How did you get into your financial dilemma?