October 1st, 2006 Forms Change and Important Announcements

The BAPCPA requires that all cases filed after October 16, 2006 report to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and to Congress certain statistics concerning the assets and liabilities of the debtors. In order to facilitate this process, there have been significant form changes that will require all EZ-Filing® users to upgrade their software. An extensive summary of the forms and changes can be found at http://www.uscourts.gov/bankform/.

Additionally, all bankruptcy courts are expected to be migrating to CM/ECF release 3.1 on or around October 16, 2006. This change incorporates a new case extract file that also facilitates the reporting of certain statistical information.

EZ-Filing, Inc. will be releasing both updates simultaneously. With regard to the CM/ECF change, some courts are migrating sooner than October 16, 2006. After October 1^st, the program will prompt you to indicate what release of CM/ECF you would like it to use in generating the case extract file. If you are unsure of the appropriate response, contact your court and ask what release of CM/ECF they are running. The EZ-Filing® program is compliant with both 3.0 and 3.1 (and all prior) releases of CM/ECF. The program will continue to prompt for this data until we hear specifically from the courts that the migration to CM/ECF release 3.1 is complete.

Normally, we do not release updates over a weekend. However, the date-sensitive timing of this update, combined with the fact that it falls over a weekend, require us to release the update this Friday September 29, 2006. If you are planning to file a new case on September 29^th or 30^th, make sure you have disabled any automatic updating features in the software and decline any automated prompts to “check for updates” until Sunday, October 1^st, 2006 when the new forms will be in use. It is recommended that you hold off doing any updates and non-emergency filings until Monday October 2^nd, 2006 if at all possible. CD subscribers can anticipate receiving the update in Monday's mail, assuming that there aren't any unanticipated problems encountered during testing this week.

Also in this release, there are new median income figures that apply to cases filed after October 1^st, 2006. You can review the DOJ's median-income table at http://www.usdoj.gov/ust/eo/bapcpa/20061001/bci_data/median_income_table.htm.

We'd like to remind you that, as the courts continue to interpret BAPCPA and modify the official forms, it is more important now than ever that your EZ-UpKeep™ subscription is current. If your subscription is due to expire soon (or if it's already expired), we encourage you to renew so that you can continue to receive the updates required to keep up with the changes.

Also effective October 1, 2006, the IRS will change its pricing structure for tax transcripts, and in the process, significantly increase prices. To account for these changes, on October 1,  the price for tax transcripts will change to $18 for one year and $9 for each additional year. Tax transcript subscribers should have already received a letter from Expedite Software, LLC in this regard. While this constitutes a price increase for multiple years, it is a slight decrease for a single year. And all that's required by code is a single year's transcript: § 521(e)(2)(A)(i) states “The debtor shall provide … a copy of the Federal income tax return … (or … a transcript of such return) for the most recent tax year ending immediately before the commencement of the case and for which a Federal income tax return was filed [emphasis added].”