What happens if your bankruptcy filing is incomplete?

Can you make an emergency filing and finish the forms later?

Yes. The official instructions say it is possible to open a case with only the forms due on the day the case is opened, with the rest due within 14 days. This is often called an emergency or skeleton filing.2

Filing the petition triggers the automatic stay, which stops most collection actions, including lawsuits, foreclosures and garnishments. That is why people facing a sale date or a garnishment sometimes file this way.4

Credit counseling still comes first. A temporary waiver is possible only for exigent circumstances, when the person asked an approved agency for counseling and could not get it within 7 days, and the waiver ends no later than 30 days after the petition is filed.5

The risk is the follow-up. If the rest is not filed, the case can be dismissed, and a dismissal weakens the automatic stay in a later case.2 6

What does the law require a debtor to file?

The Bankruptcy Code sets out the core list. Unless the court orders otherwise, a debtor must file the items below.3

• A list of creditors.3
• A schedule of assets and liabilities, and a schedule of current income and expenditures.3
• A statement of financial affairs.3
• Copies of pay stubs or other evidence of payment received from an employer within 60 days before filing.3
• A statement of monthly net income, and a statement of any reasonably anticipated increase in income or expenses over the 12 months after filing.3

The credit counseling certificate is required as well, and a case may be dismissed if credit counseling was not completed before filing. The official forms that carry all of this information are listed in the federal courts' instruction booklet for individual filers.2 7

When is each item due?

The dates below come from the national rules, the Bankruptcy Code and the official instructions. A court can have local requirements of its own, and the official instructions tell filers to check the local court's website for them.2

What does a dismissal mean for the filer?

A dismissed case ends without the result the filer wanted. One court's report on its own cases put it plainly: a person who files in haste may get the automatic stay for a short time but receive no discharge.10

A dismissal does not by itself stop a person from filing again, with one exception. An individual cannot be a debtor if, in the preceding 180 days, an earlier case was dismissed for willful failure to obey court orders or to appear in court, or the debtor asked for and obtained a voluntary dismissal after a creditor requested relief from the automatic stay.5 11

A second case is also weaker protection. If an individual had one case dismissed in the past year, the automatic stay in the new case generally ends after 30 days unless the court extends it. If two or more cases were dismissed in the past year, the stay generally does not start at all.6

What room do the rules leave?

More than people assume, but it has to be asked for. The court may extend the time to file the schedules and statements on motion and for cause.1

For the automatic dismissal rule, the debtor has to ask within the first 45 days. If the debtor does, the court may allow up to 45 more days when it finds the extension justified.3

Timing shapes every such request. A court may extend a deadline for cause when the request is made before the period expires. After the period has expired, it takes a motion and a showing that the failure to act resulted from excusable neglect, and some deadlines cannot be extended.12

Whether a missing document can still be filed in a particular case, and what to ask the court for, depends on what the docket shows. That is legal advice, and court employees and judges are prohibited by law from giving it.13

How often does this happen to people filing alone?

We found no current national figure on official pages. One court published figures for its own cases: in a 2014 report, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California said over 21 percent of pro se cases there were filed incomplete, compared with about three percent of attorney-represented cases, and that over 99 percent of the pro se cases filed with incomplete information were dismissed. Those figures come from a single district in a single year and do not predict any case today.10

Where can a filer check what is required?

The federal courts' instruction booklet lists the forms due when a case is opened and the forms due within 14 days, and says filing the entire set at one time helps the case proceed smoothly. The forms are free on the courts' website, and many courts also require local forms.2 13