RegSol: Belgium's Central Register of Solvency explained

The short answer

RegSol, the Central Register of Solvency (Centraal Register Solvabiliteit, Registre Central de la Solvabilité), is the electronic platform at regsol.be through which Belgian bankruptcy, judicial reorganisation, transfer under court authority and amicable agreement files are handled. Curators, judges, court clerks, debtors and creditors use it: companies declare bankruptcy through it, and creditors file their claims in it. It went live on 1 April 2017 under a law of 1 December 2016 and is run by the Flemish and French-speaking bar associations. It is not a public lookup tool: using it requires an account. To check whether a company is bankrupt, the public routes are the company's legal status in KBO Public Search and the bankruptcy judgments published in the Official Gazette.

This is general information for sales and credit teams, not legal advice.

What RegSol does

• Manages insolvency files. In its own words, it is where you manage "bankruptcy files, judicial reorganisations, transfers under court authority and amicable agreements".

• Receives bankruptcy declarations. A company must declare bankruptcy within one month of ceasing payments, electronically through the register, according to the Belgian courts' information pages.

• Receives creditors' claims. Creditors file their claim declarations in the file of the bankrupt company and follow their status there.

• Keeps the file. The curator, the judge-commissioner and the court work in the same electronic file.

Who can use it

The register serves the parties to an insolvency: magistrates, court clerks, the public prosecutor, curators, judges-commissioner, debtors, creditors and professionals assisting them. According to RegSol's own guide from its 2018 redesign, every use of the application requires logging in first, including searching for ongoing bankruptcies. Organisations that file claims regularly can use a multi-user account with monthly billing instead of paying per filing.

Filing a claim as a creditor

1. Find the bankruptcy and the claim deadline in the published judgment in the Official Gazette.

2. Log in to RegSol, open the file of the bankrupt company and submit your claim declaration with the supporting documents.

3. Follow the status of your claim in the file; the curator checks the claims and pays creditors in order of priority from what the bankruptcy realises.

Practitioner guides put the fee at 6 euros per claim declaration; natural persons and foreign companies without a professional representative may still file on paper. Preferred claims such as wages, social security contributions and certain taxes are paid before ordinary trade creditors.