Debt collectors and credit agencies want a return to the system under which a record of someone being made bankrupt is permanently available to the public.
A change introduced with the Insolvency Act in 2006 expunges information about people declared bankrupt after seven years.
The New Zealand Credit and Finance Institute, representing the debt collection and credit control industries, wants the previous permanent system reinstated, The New Zealand Herald reported today.
National president David Young said some people had been bankrupted two or three times over an extended period, but a private credit check did not show this up because records were kept for only seven years.
The institute is also annoyed that details under the new alternative to bankruptcy, the No Asset Procedure, will stay on the public register for only one year.
The manager of the Ministry of Economic Development's insolvency and trustee service, Ross Van Der Schyff, said the keeping of personal insolvency records was brought into line with the 2004 Credit Reporting Privacy Code when the Insolvency Act came into force.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner administers the code, and is reviewing it.
John Roberts, country director of the credit reporting agency Veda Advantage, said bankruptcies vanishing from the public record was not necessarily a problem.
It was a small industry and habitual defaulters were known.
But he believed No Asset Procedures should be treated in the same way as bankruptcies, and Veda would keep them on people's credit reports for seven years.
