Complaints in the Debt Counselling Department have not increased as much as our office would have hoped for.

This said, trends in the complaints we have dealt with indicate that credit providers seem to be terminating debt counselling matters that have been around for a long time. In all of these disputes, there where no court orders in place and consumers had been paying diligently but credit providers terminated despite this. Other major reasons for terminations have been non-acceptance of proposals (possibly due to proposed repayment amounts being too low) and consumers missing payments at some or other point.

In other instances, it has been found that consumers were under paying by small amounts such as R50 or R100. In order to avoid problems like these, we encourage debt counsellors to do thorough ‘after care’ check-ups.  These include:

• A regular review of all their portfolios to ensure that court orders are in place
• Check to see if the correct amounts are being paid over to credit providers (credit providers can terminate due to short payment, no matter how small that amount may be)
• Review consumers’ repayment plans annually to see if they can increase payments to their creditors