Only 5 of the small utility debts in Serbia are collected through compulsory judicial enforcement. In our country, this percentage is 100, since Bulgarian legislation does not provide for voluntary debt collection for electricity, heating, water or mobile phone services.
The statistics were presented at a working meeting of the Chambers of Bailiffs of Bulgaria and Serbia, which is being held in Belgrade, BNR reports.
Although in Serbia the institute of bailiffs is also modeled after the Bulgarian one, the representatives of this profession here are far from dealing only with the unattractive task of forcibly collecting debts.
Through legislative changes, which their Bulgarian colleagues are also insisting on, they also have key public functions, thanks to which the popularity of their profession has sharply increased. After they began to function as mediators between creditors and debtors, they even changed their name - from private court bailiffs to public bailiffs.
"When we started, in addition to forcibly enforcing court decisions, to also take on other commitments related to guaranteeing citizens' rights, we saw how the attitude towards us changed both among citizens and the media, said Boyan Kostić, president of the Chamber of Public Bailiffs in Serbia.
Today, his colleagues collect on a voluntary basis nearly 95 percent of the so-called small debts - up to 200 euros - and enforce almost all court decisions related to family cases, parental regimes, and compensation for dismissals.
In our country - this legislative change has been stalled for years. Specific texts for the introduction of a procedure for voluntary extrajudicial collection of small debts in our country have again been submitted to the Ministry of Justice:
"In fact, it turns out that this procedure is very effective. That is, it is also in the interest of creditors, not only debtors. Because they collect their money much cheaper, and they do not wait. And this, on the other hand, leads to financial discipline, which is greatly underestimated in Bulgaria, but the financial discipline of society is of utmost importance. Because if it becomes clear that there is no effective judicial enforcement or that it does not work and the judicial system does not work as a whole, people stop repaying their debts and from there the economy will simply collapse," says Georgi Dichev, chairman of the Chamber of Private Enforcement Agents, regarding the advantages of voluntary collection of household debts, which exists in almost all of Europe.