Greg Quinn.
Kim Wallman.
Is the COVID era’s great redundancy beginning to manifest in a rising administrative error rate as practices struggle to rebuild staff competency depleted during the pandemic?
In less than a week iNO has come across two examples of mistakes by staff in insolvency practices that have ended up in court, and while two blunders does not a crisis make iNO likes to get ahead of the curve.
The first stuff up involved a staff member of a trustee in bankruptcy lodging a debtors petition with the Official Receiver that contained false information. You can read about that in: Trustee failed to exercise due care: judge.
The second instance – detailed in Gregory Paul Quinn in his capacity as the former liquidator of Blue Horseshoe Ventures Pty Ltd -v- Australian Securities and Investments Commission [2024] WASC 327 involves two HLB Mann Judd WA partners who were forced to apply to court for the reinstatement of a company to which they’d been appointed liquidators after it was mistakenly deregistered.
There error, which Supreme Court of West Australia judge Jenni Hill described as “both honest and inadvertent” arose from the filing of a form 5603 with ASIC which incorrectly indicated the report was being filed by the plaintiffs as liquidators of a creditors’ voluntary liquidation, rather than a report being filed at the end of a voluntary administration.
“Pursuant to s 509 of the Act, on the lodging of the form, ASIC was required to deregister the Company,” the judge said.
“Since the Company’s deregistration, the plaintiffs have been unable to complete their required tasks as liquidators for the winding up of the Company.”
Fortunately for appointees Greg Quinn and Kim Wallman, the error didn’t prejudice any creditor or any action the liquidators had on foot.
The error occurred in March this year but the application for reinstatement wasn’t filed with the court until August after ASIC advised the liquidators it was unable to assist in rectifying the error.
ASIC of course has been dealing with issues as to competency since well before the pandemic.
Further reading:
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