An Interesting Disputes Tribunal Tale - Continued

Further to our blog An Interesting Disputes Tribunal Tale the District Court judge has come back with his decision on granting of an appeal.

I agree with the original applicant. Matters must be brought to finality. As I have pointed out, there are only limited appeal grounds to the District Court. It can never be the position that a party should be allowed an appeal, or for that matter a rehearing, only to correct errors or omissions in their conduct of the original hearing, which might have led to an adverse result. I accept that the conduct of these hearings is over to the parties themselves, before a Referee (in this case a qualified Barrister and Solicitor) .......... they are not entitled to representation by lawyers. 

However, the offset for that is that they are on an equal footing, that the hearing takes place less formally than in a Court, rather sooner, and of course at much less expense for the parties. The "substantial merits and justice" provisions of S.18 (6) of the Act apply. Consistent with these factors, decisions are expected, as was the case here, almost immediately, or as soon as can be. 

The appellant appears to me to have misunderstood the very limited nature of the appeal rights to the District Court, treating them as some kind of further re-hearing application. This is not right. It is not an appropriate case then for me to grant leave to bring the appeal out of time.

So what does this mean?

Quite simply, once you have been through the Disputes Tribunal process and the Referee has given his/her decision then that decision is binding unless one party has been treated unfairly.

Debts Hit Small Firms Survey

We are often told we must be busy right now. Fair comment. But if we are busy then how is this affecting our clients?

A recent survey by Veda Advantage was reported in the Dominion Post on 10 Oct 2011. The report reads:

"The country's small and medium size businesses in the construction, property/business and manufacturing industries have been the hardest hit by bad debtors this year"

"Most bad debts were under $10,000 but 17 per cent of firms surveyed advised they were carrying bad debts worth more than $10,000."

We would agree with these results although our sample size is a little smaller. The report also goes on to say:

"It was disturbing 48 per cent of firms said they did not run a trade credit process, meaning they were not assessing risk when they advanced credit and they were not keeping a close eye on a client's ongoing ability to pay."

Again, we would agree that these numbers are disturbing although we have found a number of our client's are now much careful with who they deal with and are obtaining credit reports and taking notice of industry scuttlebug. We also have a number of client's who contact us for any market infomation we may have. We have no problem with this and welcome this opportunity.


The other issue of concern for businesses in the construction industries is how many do not seem to be taking advantage of the Construction Contracts Act. For more infomation about the act see my blog How to save yourself from the next Signature Homes debacle