Combatting Fear of Abuse--A Sisyphean Task?

Over the past few weeks, at conferences with judges and policymakers in Varna (Bulgaria), Seoul, and Beijing, I've been confronted with a surprising degree of skepticism about personal insolvency systems and fear of opportunistic individuals abusing the ability to evade their debts (especially while hiding assets). I've pointed out the interesting progression identifiable in Europe in recent years of a marked relaxation of such fear of abuse, especially in places like France and most recently Slovakia, which have gone all the way to adopting a very US-like open-access system to immediate discharge. For the real skeptics--and they are numerous in Bulgaria and China, both of whom are considering adopting their first personal insolvency laws--these arguments seem to fall on more or less deaf ears. Detractors put me in a no-win situation by offering one of two rejoinders: (1) the incidence of discovered abuse is low in these systems because debtors are crafty or anti-abuse institutions are weak, or (2) anti-abuse institutions like the means test and restrictive access hurdles are successfully dissuading abusers from seeking access, so we need more--not less--of this kind of effort (which I've criticized as wasteful, unnecessary, and counterproductive). A common third response is the classic "we're different" position--that is, any comparative empirical evidence from elsewhere is irrelevant to the new, entirely unique context of [insert skeptical country's name here].

I've considered launching into some kind of research project to address this skepticism, but I don't think it will help. The situation reminds me of the two most common resistant reactions to empirical research: (1) we already knew that, or (2) that can't be true. The haters are gonna hate, it seems to me. So if the lighthouse is no good, we need to come up with a different approach to assuaging the concerns of policymakers, especially in China, that rampant abuse will not infect a new personal insolvency system and undermine public confidence and payment morality.

I've come to believe institutions are our best strategy. An Insolvency Service or other administrative organ dedicated to rooting out fraud and processing these (mostly) low-value cases in a quick, efficient, low-cost, and minimally formal way seems to be a win-win. It reassures the skeptics that a cop is on the beat, and it avoids allowing formalities, especially court formalities, to bog down these cases. Obviously an agency can get caught up in its own procedures, too (and substance matters, as well, as evidenced by the extremely inefficient German procedure and the hunt for the slightest hint of abuse in the UK's DRO procedure), but it seems to me that diverting personal bankruptcy cases away from the courts somehow is key (including by getting a private trustee to do all the work and engaging the courts only when (rarely) necessary, as in the US and UK). 

But an entirely new agency structure is also expensive, in terms of both monetary expenditure (both initial and ongoing) and personnel development (both recruitment and training). I wonder whether this cure is worse than the disease, and it offers another powerful lever of resistance by abuse-fearing policymakers.

I would greatly welcome any thoughts that others have about the proper way to achieve the closely related goals of (1) assuring skeptics that abuse can and will be laid bare (to the extent reasonably possible) and (2) moving personal insolvency cases through processing quickly and efficiently to a reinvigorating discharge. Many places are struggling with this issue, so I hope a crowdfunding strategy might produce some innovative ideas.