Consensus and Dispute about Chapter 7 Debtors. There is rough consensus about the income distribution of relatively recent chapter 7 filers. Other studies over similar populations are likewise in general agreement about the income distribution of chapter 7 debtors. This common ground is important because legislative proposals for means-testing have so far all begun with comparisons of debtor gross income with national median incomes. Other areas of agreement are likely to be found regarding amounts of secured, priority, and unsecured debt, that is, values that are available directly from schedules provided at or near the time of filing.
Maximum estimates are five to eight times greater than minimum estimates.
Much of the difference between the bottom lines arises from differences between judgment calls that the authors had to make in order to run the numbers as called for by the legislation. This sort of disagreement is not inevitable. If all the participants in this research shared their data and described their calculations completely, arguments about apparent factual discrepancies could more quickly be replaced by debates over competing policy positions. Chapter 13 Debtors and Cases Information aggregated to a national level about the course and contents of chapter 13 cases has not been as readily accessible as chapter 7 data. Hence, there is no court-based national compilation of the course of debtors' progress through chapter 13.