New Orleans is known for many things including its distinct Creole cuisine, big band music, unique dialect, and regular celebrations and festivals. The city is rich in history and offers much to its visitors, residents, and local economy. But recent hurricanes, floods, and other natural disasters have threatened the city of almost 400,000 with a loss of funds and commercial debt issues.

Business in NOLA

There are more than 20 significant corporations that have built headquarters in New Orleans, including IMB, Rolls-Royce, AT&T, Harrah’s Entertainment, Capital One, and a single Fortune 500 company (Entergy). Tourism is a staple of New Orleans’ economy, with the tourist and convention industry making up more than $5 billion of the city’s tax revenues. (Wikipedia.org)

Debt Issues

With a D grade and $3 billion in city debt, New Orleans has accumulated a burden of almost $19,000 per taxpayer (Data-z.org). Some of the city’s debt issues have stemmed from its residents’ medical debt, which have recently been forgiven by RIP Medical Debt, a company that raised money to wipe out old medical debt for cities around the United States.

Commercial Debt Laws

New Orleans and the state of Louisiana have a variety of strict and lax commercial debt collection laws. The default interest rate for legal and judgment cases is 9.75 percent. For businesses that write bad checks, civil penalties call for written demand action after 30 days, with twice the check amount for attorney fees and court costs. For Louisiana, statute of limitations for written contracts, and foreign and domestic judgments is 10 years; it’s 5 years for promissory notes, and 3 years for open accounts. For more information on specific commercial debt collection laws in Louisiana and New Orleans, see our summary page.

 

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/MSY-2018-2pager.pdf
https://www.nola.com/news/healthcare_hospitals/article_907bc5b4-3e31-11ea-8b39-ffaf312a7b14.html