10 Tips for Insolvency Practitioners

Because it does. Office-holders enjoy investigative advantages private litigants lack, including access routes such as the Land Registry index of proprietors' names search available to trustees in bankruptcy, and those advantages compound when paired with professional tracing: property mapped with charges and equity analysed, corporate interests and control positions established, vehicles, plant and vessels identified, lifestyle checked against declared means.

The craft is following value, not just names. Assets rarely vanish; they move, to spouses, new companies, associates, and the movement itself is the finding, timed and documented for your solicitors' antecedent transaction analysis.

Equally important is knowing the red lines. No lawful route exists to another person's bank balances, and any supplier offering them is offering a criminal offence that would poison the estate's litigation. The lawful product positions you for the court's own disclosure tools, private examinations included, which brings us neatly to the next tip.

The private examination powers, section 236 of the Insolvency Act for companies, section 366 for bankruptcies, are among the sharpest tools an office-holder holds: the court can summon directors, associates and anyone with relevant knowledge to answer on oath and produce documents. Their effectiveness, though, is built on groundwork investigators do.

First, the respondents must be found and served, and people facing examination have every incentive to be elusive; located-and-served is the unglamorous foundation of the whole exercise. Second, the questioning is only as good as the brief: an intelligence pack mapping the respondent's companies, transactions, property movements and known associations turns a fishing expedition into a targeted interrogation.

The combination is powerful. An examinee who realises the office-holder already knows about the yard, the transfers and the new company tends to become cooperative remarkably quickly, and many examinations settle into disclosure and deals before the hearing. That is the intelligence doing its job.

Sometimes the question is not where the assets are but what the subject actually does all day. Undischarged bankrupts trading through fronts, directors running phoenix operations from the old premises, declared penury alongside undeclared lifestyle: these are observation problems, and lawful surveillance answers them.

The legal frame matters and is well established: public-place observation, no trespass or harassment, and a documented impact assessment before deployment, the standard the sector's ICO-approved Code requires for all covert work. Within it, even short deployments are productive, because commercial activity is visible by nature: deliveries, signage, staff, opening hours.

Proportionality is the watchword for the estate's costs as much as for compliance. Two targeted days around known patterns usually answer the question; open-ended watching rarely survives a costs review. Instruct surveillance against a specific factual assertion you need to prove or disprove, and it earns its place in the toolkit.

Insolvency work is examined from more directions than almost any other instruction: courts test the evidence, creditors and committees test the costs, regulators test the office-holder's conduct, and opposing solicitors test everything else. Investigative material only helps if it survives all four.

That means suppliers whose methods are documented, not just effective: lawful bases and impact assessments behind traces and surveillance, sources stated in asset reports, data handled under audited standards such as ISO 27001, and engagement terms that deal properly with data protection roles. The ABI's ICO-approved Code of Conduct now gives IPs a ready benchmark for exactly this, and it is fair to ask any investigator where they stand against it.

The payoff is resilience. When a director's solicitors attack the provenance of your evidence, the answer is a file, not a shrug. Estates have lost recoveries to tainted evidence; none has ever lost one to evidence that was gathered too carefully.

The appointments that go smoothly are usually the ones where the investigator already knows the IP's preferences: report formats, urgency conventions, billing structure, risk appetite. That familiarity is built in peacetime, a scoping call on a marginal case, a standing arrangement for demand service, feedback after a big trace, and it pays out precisely when a director vanishes on a Friday afternoon.

A long-standing supplier also becomes an early-warning system, flagging when a routine serve reveals an empty unit, or when a trace surfaces connected companies worth a second look, because they understand what matters to an office-holder without being told each time.

Tremark has supported the insolvency profession for over thirty years, and much of what we know about serving it well came from exactly these relationships. If you would like to see how we brief, report and price before an urgent case forces the introduction, the door is open.