Dismissed.....Lawyer dropped the ball.

[angelina1]

I had a lawyer for my Chapter 13. The last week of the banruptcy I was dismissed for failure to turn over my income taxes. All five years I sent in copies of returns and sent a letter to my lawyer (which I was told to do by trustee) explaining why I needed my refunds. Lawyer NEVER filed paperwork!!! Any advice?? I paid the trustee so much money over the years it makes me siick to think all that money was just wasted.

[Flamingo]

The information you need is probably in your original Plan paperwork given to you at confirmation...ours stated we had to supply copies of both federal and state tax returns within 5 days of filing each year directly to the trustee. Your lawyer may have thought you copied him in information that was supposed to be sent to the trustee. In any event, it's up to your attorney to get this straightened out with your trustee so what you need to do is sit down with your attorney and figure out what exactly went wrong.

[justbroke]

I spoke about this in a prior thread. You are not allowed to keep refunds and just send a notice to the Trustee. This is clearly stated in the Confirmation Order. Additionally, all of the Chapter 13 Trustees in Florida, that I know of, send out an annual notice to Chapter 13 debtors regarding tax returns and refunds. I have never seen where a (Florida) Chapter 13 Trustee has allowed a debtor to just send a note that the debtor is keeping the refund. Every information notice I've read from my Trustee was to send the refund check to the Trustee along with a note asking if you can keep it.

Unless you can negotiate with the Trustee, as I indicated in the other thread, then your case will be dismissed. It was a requirement of the Chapter 13 to surrender all tax refunds, even though you could seek permission to use the refund.

Is your attorney not helping you through this at all? I don't understand the comment that the attorney never filed paperwork.

[hanginginmd]

Meet with your lawyer and come up with a way to payback the sum of all the refunds you didn't turn over....assuming that is a manageable amount.

[jetsfan2010]

Hope that works out for you, but like others said, your attorney should be on the phone with the trustee right now.