Justice Department officials are escalating their battle to collect fees from bankrupt companies with their appeal of a Texas judge’s recent decision that some businesses are exempt from the higher fees ordered by federal lawmakers in late 2017, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Justice Department officials on Feb. 21 asked a federal judge to review a Feb. 8 ruling from U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald King, who ruled that the once-bankrupt owner of Old Country Buffet, Ryan’s and other buffet-style restaurants could pay a smaller amount of fees for using the federal court system. In his 13-page ruling in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Antonio, Judge King said that it would be unfair for Buffets LLC to pay higher quarterly fees under a new federal law that took effect months after the company declared bankruptcy in 2016. Federal lawmakers who voted to increase fees starting Jan. 1, 2018, didn’t specify whether the higher rate would apply to companies that had filed for bankruptcy protection before that date. Judge King said that applying the higher rate to companies already in bankruptcy would violate constitutional protections of due process.
