The Act: Overview Bankruptcy Section 19: Bankruptcy: service of documents
78.This section inserts a new section 224A into the 2016 Act, which applies whenever the 2016 Act, or regulations made under it, authorises or requires a document to be served on a person, whatever particular wording is used to describe this. The new section 224A(1) allows service of a document by personal delivery, by post or by electronic transmission.
79.Section 224A(2) and (3) set out the practicalities of serving a document under the 2016 Act by post, including when receipt is deemed to have taken place.
80.Section 224A(4) provides further detail in relation to documents served by electronic means. Electronic transmission of a document must be effected in a manner that the recipient has indicated to the sender that they are willing to receive the document electronically. Subsection (4)(b) makes provision as to the circumstances in which willingness to receive a document electronically may be given or inferred. Subsection (4)(c) provides that uploading a document to an electronic storage system from where it may be downloaded by the recipient may constitute electronic transmission, where the recipient is sent a notification that the document has been uploaded in that way. Finally, subsection (4)(d) provides that a document transmitted electronically is to be taken to have been received on the day on which transmission took place: however this is only a presumption which can be displaced if there is evidence to the contrary.
81.The effect of subsection (5) is that different provision may be made regarding the service of documents by rules of court, or by an order of court depending on the circumstances of an individual case, and the rest of section 224A will not apply.
82.Subsection (3) of section 15 repeals section 187 of the 2016 Act, which previously only applied to Part 14 of the 2016 Act on administration, accounting and discharge, as the new section 224A is to apply across the whole of the 2016 Act’s provisions.
83.Subsection (4) of section 15 makes transitional provision to ensure that the new law represented in section 224A only applies to documents served on or after the commencement date of 1 October 2022 (see section 59 for commencement arrangements).