The “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005″ requires that debtors obtain credit counseling from accredited counselors prior to filing for bankruptcy. This new requirement was an additional burden for people who were already unable to pay their bills.

To help relieve this burden, the Tides Foundation of San Francisco sponsored the development of a website to provide free, online bankruptcy counseling. to consumers. The site allows users to enter financial information, and then uses expert system technology to generate financial and credit advice. To fulfill legal requirements, the advice generated by the system is approved by a certified counselor prior to being sent to the user. The user can then be issued a certificate of completion to fulfill the requirements of the 2005 bankruptcy act.

The site, ConsumerBankruptcyCounseling.info, was developed by LunaGraphica, a Silicon Valley web development firm, and has already provided counseling for over 6,000 users.

This post was submitted by Bob Nicholson.

Tags: bankruptcy, credit counseling, expert system

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Advertising, Financial, Internet, Legal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.