Brent Norling

Um, most of the time, no.

Um, most of the time it's not deliberate.

Most of the time it's actually, um,

probably just very poor business owners.

A lot of it in certain industries like construction, they might be great on the tools, but just terrible at pricing.

That's one that we see all the time.

And so they make genuine business mistakes that result in this debt being accumulated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's hard to generalize, but I'll probably the bulk of them are, um,

they've received the statutory demand or liquidation proceedings from the IRD and that's prompted them to, you know, pull the head out of the sand and talk to someone because a lot of the time the problems, they started from around March of 2020 and there's just been a series of events, you know, there's been COVID lockdowns, there's been floods, there's been a whole bunch of things that have impacted different businesses and

And everyone's got a story on how they got here.

One, again, in the construction industry that I see all the time is you'll have a large construction company like Ebert's or Stanley Construction.

And when that fails, it's all those small businesses that don't get paid.

Um, and they do their best for a number of years.

And so usually it's, you know, three, four years of them trying to play catch up.

Um, and there's going deeper and deeper into the, into a hole, um, until they eventually have to have to liquidate.

And I think part of what contributes to that is, um,

So there was a, um, insolvency accountant who did the numbers on what the effective interest rate was for, um, interest and penalties on PAYE in particular, and it's 150% per year.

And so, um, you know, if you're, if you're struggling to keep up and you've got a debt and it's accumulating interest at interest and penalties at that rate, it's really hard to get a head off.