GI-2025-48-reg3: Regulations Amending the Bankruptcy and Insolvency General Rules and the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Regulations

If you run a Licensed Insolvency Trustee practice — roughly 1,000 trustees managing over 100,000 filings per year, with about 53% qualifying as small businesses — your fees are going up for the first time since 1998: bankruptcy administration fees rise from a tiered structure starting at $975 to one starting at $1,700, consumer proposal fees increase from $750 to $850 per payment, and counselling session fees jump from $85 to $120, all indexed to inflation going forward. You'll also be able to email notices, keep electronic records, and use digital signatures instead of printing and mailing documents, saving an estimated $211 million in administrative costs across the sector over 20 years. On the creditor side — particularly banks, credit card companies, and some small business creditors — you can expect to recover less from insolvent estates, with the government estimating a total reduction in creditor debt recovery of $744 million over 20 years as more estate funds flow to LIT remuneration. Debtors with assets under $20,000 (up from $15,000) or debts under $325,000 (up from $250,000) will now qualify for simpler, cheaper insolvency proceedings, and LIT software providers will need to update their systems to reflect new fee formulas and inflation-indexing logic, with one-time IT costs estimated at approximately $400,000 industry-wide.