Reading Time: 3 minutes

Coming To You

The National Consumer Tribunal (NCT) has authority in terms of the National Credit Act (NCA) to hear matters relating to debt review where all parties agree to the Debt Counsellors debt review proposal. Recently the amendments to the National Credit Act gave the NCT an even wider range of matters it can hear. Sadly turn around times on matters sent to the NCT have not been as fast as expected.

Planning For Growth

Knowing that volumes of cases were increasing, the NCT made plans a long time back to introduce a fast electronic way to submit cases that would allow them to deal with cases faster and in higher numbers. A demo of the system was tested and rolled out (at the time on Excel). The results looked very promising and as the popularity of the DCRS debt restructuring proposal system grew among some larger debt counselling firms so did the amount of consented matters that could be put before the NCT.

Not Fast, Makes Furious

_DSC0098For a while matters were being heard and dealt with in less than 2 months (from application). Slowly as the numbers of applications have risen (not by a huge margin but it has grown) the matters coming back out of the NCT have slowed down. Consumers and Debt Counsellors began to grumble. the system which was meant to be developed to speed up things remained an Excel version and training in regard to it’s use was not rolled out as far as had originally been indicated might happen. By the time of the 2015 Debt Review Awards in June, NCT Chairperson Dianne Tereblanche felt obliged in her speech to mention the issue.

Motion Courts

The NCT have now seen that drastic action is needed to get matters back on track. As such, they have arranged for the NCT to travel to cities across the country to “hear ” matters in a special short term arrangement. These special motion courts will allow local Debt Counsellors to bring their matters to be heard and resolved on the day. They have distributed a list of the needed documentation and basic process and will soon release the dates.

Speeding up in the face of the Slow Down

It is hoped that this can ‘right the ship’ before the problem gets too far out of hand. With matters currently having slowed down at the Tribunal and with some recent issues with DCRS (as well as the continued slow adoption of the proposal system by Debt Counsellors) it seems that application numbers for consent orders through the NCT are now dropping anyway. This situation is not ideal as the process through the Tribunal (when possible for some consumers) costs very little and saves consumers lots of money. The demand for the NCT’s services and rulings in regard to debt review related matters is probably only going to increase-should DCRS be adopted by a higher number of Debt Counsellors and with decreased comebacks on DCRS proposals by credit providers. Lets hope this step helps get the workload and turnaround times back on track.

Download PDFSDownload the Recent NCT Circular about the Motion Courts here: NATIONAL CONSUMER TRIBUNAL COMMUNICATION TO THE DEBT COUNSELLORS