IVA Providers up 40% - Supervision down.

The vultures are still circling. The Financial Times reported Friday that the number of companies providing an insolvency agreement service to debtors were up by 40 per cent last year.

The FT quotes research by the TDX Group - a company which claims to be revolutionising the debt industry with its focus on data and analytics.

Guess we could all do with more analytic focus but the detail of the TDX research is more important because it goes on to say that this increase in the number of Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) providers also meant that the number of companies with insolvency practitioners setting up at least 250 IVAs each quarter had doubled.

Isn't that obscene ? No matter how many junior staff they employ, how can any IP competently supervise that volume of new IVA proposals ?

The simple answer to my own question ? They can't !

The number of IPs licensed in 2006 hasn't increased in proportion to the growth in IVAs or the number of companies offering them. So the quality of supervision must go down. But where is the accountability ?

Insolvency Practitioners are officers of the court and public servants and, so long as they carry out their duties according to the letter of the law, they are protected from civil legal action. But most of the big players in the so-called 'personal debt market' are not advertising themselves as IPs - they call themselves IVA providers and this is a different beast altogether.

Somewhere behind the adverts there must lurk an Insolvency Practitioner because only a licensed IP can set up and supervise an IVA - but they remain anonymous. The big players in the market never advertise the number of licensed IPs they employ and I wonder if they're getting away with something here.

Firms of solicitors and accountants do not operate anonymously. They declare their partners and their qualifications up front. They are visible. Why are the IPs employed by the IVA providers invisible ? Shouldn't they be named and listed in company adverts or literature ?

This visiblilty is important because the law gives IPs a status and protection that is similar to that granted to solicitors. They are also supposed to be a regulated profession and if there is any mis-selling of IVAs this should be a disciplinary matter for their regulatory body - not a matter for the Advertising Standards Authority or the Office of Fair Trading who can only direct their attention at the company rather than the IP.

The industry is accused of mis-selling but If IPs can hide behind the corporate facade of an IVA provider how can they be held accountable ? After all, they must be underpinning the mis-selling by their very presence. There are no IVAs without them.