Many clients worry about how public the information in a bankruptcy will be: who gets or can see the information in their personal chapter 7 bankruptcy? After all, when a person files bankruptcy, they are filing a 50-plus-page Petition that lays bare *all* of their income, assets, debts and financial transactions for the past 1-3 years. Since all bankruptcies are legal filings with the US Bankruptcy Court, they are public documents and, by definition, accessible to anyone. In reality, however, very few people have their bankruptcy found or seen by anyone other than the creditors listed in their bankruptcy Petition. How can this be?
Who Automatically Receives Notice of a Bankruptcy?
When a bankruptcy is filed in one of the 94 federal districts of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, a Notice of the bankruptcy is sent to every one of the creditors listed in the petition, and to the debtor and the debtor’s attorney. This means that anyone owed money by the petitioner will know about the bankruptcy: every credit card, car loan, student loan, tax agency, doctor or hospital, mortgage holder, person with a legal judgment against the debtor, and financial institution or friend/family member who loaned the person money will be informed of the debt. That’s because all creditors have the right to show up to a public hearing (called a 341 Hearing) in which the debtor is questioned about the bankruptcy by a Bankruptcy Trustee, and those creditors are allowed to object to their debt being discharged (erased) by the bankruptcy.
Although any creditor may theoretically show up to a 341 Hearing, almost none do. Credit cards never show up because they have no defense: they chose to lend money without collateral (and charge a hefty interest rate instead) and the person filing bankruptcy is entitled to have unsecured debt erased if they qualify for bankruptcy. Tax agencies, medical creditors and loan companies don’t show up for the same reasons: they won’t prevail so it makes no economic sense to spend time objecting. The creditors who do show up at 341 Meetings tend to be people with a personal axe to grind: wronged friends or business associates.
Other than creditors, no one else is directly notified of your bankruptcy. If someone wants to find out whether you’ve filed bankruptcy, they would need to do one of two things. First, they could do a Google search. But, simply plugging a name into Goggle tends not to “out” someone who’s filed bankruptcy, unless you also happen to know which one of the 94 bankruptcy courts that person filed bankruptcy in. That’s because Google search results tend not to place bankruptcy listings toward the top of search results if using just a person’s name and “bankruptcy”: it’s too general a search parameter for the Google search algorithm to place it in the first few pages of results – in other words, in the easy to find places. But, once you know the district the bankruptcy was filed in, adding “Los Angeles” or “Santa Barbara,” for example, with the name of someone who’s filed in one of those districts, then you’ll get a highly-ranked result (first or second page of results). But, the point is: without knowing the district in which a debtor filed bankruptcy, it is hard to find the bankruptcy.
Second, someone wanting to find your bankruptcy Petition could consult Pacer, the one, centralized listing of bankruptcy filings by all districts. However, there are two things that make even searching for your bankruptcy on Pacer difficult. For one, hardly anyone but attorneys knows that Pacer is the database containing bankruptcy information. In order to find this information, you’d need to search Google for the name of the database. And, if you know/find out about Pacer, accessing bankruptcy filings requires registration to use the site and payment to access any legal filings, surely another deterrent for many people.
Implication? Almost no one in your life has the incentive to casually search for whether you’ve filed bankruptcy because it requires too much specific knowledge to find your bankruptcy filing. This isn’t the case if you’re a celebrity, however. TMZ and other celebrity-gossip media outlets are always scouring court databases in all local, county and state jurisdictions across the country for things like arrests and bankruptcies. But, for regular “civilians,” almost no one cares, knows how to find this information, or wants to pay for it.
Who Doesn’t Receive Notice of a Bankruptcy?
Note who doesn’t receive a bankruptcy Notice from the Court: any vendor who is fee-for-service. Unless you owe your utility company, or mobile phone carrier, or landlord, or car insurance company, more than just last month’s bill, no one to whom you pay a regular, monthly fee for a service considered essential to living is notified of your bankruptcy. Fee-for-service vendors are not considered creditors, unless you’ve racked up a lot of unpaid bills and include the vendor as a creditor in your bankruptcy petition.
Bankruptcy Does Show On Your Credit Report for 10 Years
The one place it’s easy to find the *fact* of your bankruptcy, though not the 50-plus pages of *details* on the Bankruptcy Petition is on your Credit Report, where a chapter 7 bankruptcy is listed for 10 years and a chapter 13 (repayment) bankruptcy is listed for 7 years. Credit Reports list the date of the bankruptcy, the case number and which jurisdiction it was filed in. However, the only people/institutions who can access your Credit Report are the ones you give permission to access it. And, even someone who sees your actual Credit Report would still not have access to the 50-page plus bankruptcy Petition that detailed your finances.
This requires going to the specific, district Bankruptcy Court website in which you filed bankruptcy, or to Pacer, to access your filed Petition. Even in district bankruptcy court search engines, downloading a full bankruptcy petition often also often involves payment of a fee (this varies from court to court). For example, check out the cost of searching at the Central District of California Bankruptcy Court, the court I most often file client’s cases in, click on the “Case Locator” bar on the left): the only way to access the 50+ page filed petitions is to go through Pacer.
In short, despite bankruptcy Petitions being public documents, they are relatively difficult to find and access except by someone very determined to do so. Questions? Call me at 818.889.8080.
February 17, 2026