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What actually happens when an Australian business fails?

Not the sanitised version. The real one - the day-one phone calls, the employees demanding wages to put food on the table that night, the childcare centres where a commercial decision becomes a moral one, and the directors who waited six months too long to pick up the phone.

In this episode I sit down with Glenn Livingstone, founding partner of WLP Restructuring - one of Australia's fastest-growing independent insolvency firms. Glenn has nearly two decades in the profession, over 1,000 formal appointments, and has returned over $21 million to creditors since co-founding WLP out of COVID in 2021.

But before any of that - Glenn first read a creditors report at age 13. His father had just lost his entitlements in a corporate collapse. The liquidator recovered $400,000. Their fees were $400,000. That moment chose his career for him.

This conversation goes well beyond the mechanics of insolvency. It's honest, commercially sharp, and at times genuinely moving.

🏗️ Building WLP from Nothing

• Walking away from KPMG during COVID to start an independent firm with three people and no guaranteed work
• How WLP landed 4 voluntary administration appointments in its first week

⚠️ Early Warning Signs of Business Distress

• The financial red flags directors consistently ignore until it's too late
• Why the ATO has functioned as a de facto bank for struggling SMEs - and why that era is ending fast
• Why directors wait too long - and what it costs them when they do

🚨 Payday Super: The Coming Reckoning

• Why the introduction of payday super is "a little bit frightening" from an insolvency perspective
• What the closure of clearing houses means for businesses already under pressure
• Why this change won't increase the number of insolvencies - but will dramatically accelerate their timing

🔄 The Small Business Restructuring Regime

• Why SBR was a genuine game changer for viable businesses in distress
• Why the ATO is now rejecting proposals it used to wave through and what that means for directors
• The one-shot nature of SBR - and why botching it is catastrophic
• The uncomfortable question nobody in the profession is asking yet about the 2023-24 SBR cohort

⚖️ Insolvent Trading & Section 588G

• Whether Australia's insolvent trading regime is actually working as intended
• Why 588G plays completely differently for SME directors versus ASX-listed companies
• How liquidators decide when to pursue insolvent trading claims - and when it's simply uneconomic

😔 The Human Side of Appointments

• What day one actually looks like inside a failing business - the staff, the suppliers, the distress
• Why childcare appointments are among the hardest in the profession
• How to stay calm when employees are demanding money

📰 Media, Scrutiny & High Profile Collapses

• The role media plays in major administrations - when it helps versus hurts
• How administrators navigate the press when a high-profile business goes under
• The story of Daryl Lee chocolates - and how a media announcement accidentally saved the business

Glenn Livingstone is one of the most commercially pragmatic and genuinely human practitioners in Australian insolvency. This is the conversation most directors never have - until it's too late.

If you're a director, founder, accountant, lawyer, or creditor - this episode will change how you think about business distress.

Connect with Glenn: wlpr.com.au

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Your credit score might not be the real reason you were declined.

What if the decision came from a fraud flag, behavioural risk score, or database you're not allowed to see? No notification. No explanation. No right to correct it.

In this episode I sit down with Graham Doessel - Founder & CEO of MyCRA Lawyers, Australia's only dedicated credit repair law firm.

30 years inside the system. 91%+ audited success rate removing defaults. If nine out of ten can be removed, how many should never have been listed?

He debated former Privacy Commissioner Tim Pilgrim on 4BC - the phone lines lit up. He now argues Australia's credit system operates on a "guilty until proven innocent" model.

💡 What You'll Learn - Inside Australia's Credit Black Box:

⚡ The credit decision black box - bureau data, IDMatrix, device fingerprints, behavioural modelling and algorithmic scoring. Apply too often and velocity checks flag you across lenders before a human ever sees it.

🏠 What score do you need for a mortgage? - there's an Equifax threshold borrowers don't know about. Miss it by one point: auto-declined. Hit it and you can still be rejected for postcode, job stability, or a payday lender inquiry. A good score gets you to the door. Behind it is another black box.

🕵️ Equifax's secret fraud list - Fraud Focus Group and IDMatrix databases silently blacklisting people for up to 15 years. Graham asked Equifax directly. They declined to answer. He argues Part IIIA of the Privacy Act requires disclosure if this data is being used to assess or refuse credit - and that isn’t happening.

🔒 How innocent people get flagged and never told - apply too many times while desperate and fraud engines blacklist you for years. Not fraud by any definition. These systems sit outside credit reporting frameworks - declined without seeing what triggered it.

🏦 The debanking connection - opaque scoring and fraud signals intersect with Australia's debanking crisis, explored in my episode with Harrison Dell.

⚖️ "Not a single lender has the legal right to list anything on a credit file" - Graham's bombshell, eight years in the making. Every default, inquiry and late repayment potentially unlawful. Revealed here first.

📮 "They just make shit up" - a creditor sent a fabricated default notice on letterhead of a company that hadn't been incorporated. When challenged, they produced a different document.

🏦 "AFCA sides with the ones who pay their bills." - funded by the same banks and lenders whose complaints it adjudicates. No conflict of interest there, right?

📉 CCR was mis-sold - inquiries 42% of your score. Late repayments 38%. Defaults just 7%. A four-cent late payment does more damage than a court judgment.

🔍 The shadow data economy - skip-tracing platforms aggregating billions of records from telcos, ASIC registers, marketing datasets and public records. Most people don't know these databases exist.

🏛️ 355,000 taxpayers sent to Recoveriescorp - private-equity backed. Final notices targeting welfare recipients. Critics warn of Robodebt 2.0.

📊 Equifax holds 85% of Australia's credit files. One algorithm. Millions of outcomes. People with bad credit "get treated like lepers."

🤬 "These fucksticks in power have no clue."

💀 "The system is fucking broken. It really is."

📊 "They don't give a fuck about you. You're just a number."

Connect with Graham Doessel:

💼 MyCRA Lawyers - https://www.m

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In this deep-dive conversation, I sit down with Harrison Dell, one of Australia’s most recognisable tax lawyers and the founder of Cadena Legal. You may know him from TikTok and LinkedIn, where he turns dense tax law into sharp, funny, brutally clear explanations - including his famous dig at the ATO’s DeFi guidance being “single-ply toilet paper.”

But behind the humour is a lawyer with rare insider insight.

Before founding Cadena, Harry spent years inside the Australian Taxation Office, rotating through the graduate program, complex audit teams, and eventually the Tax Avoidance Taskforce. His experience gives him a uniquely honest view of how the ATO thinks, how it selects cases, and what it gets wrong - especially as debt collection hardens and litigation outcomes slip.

Across two hours, we cover:

🧩 Inside the ATO

• How the ATO actually works behind closed doors
• Data matching, AI, and the staggering amount of information the ATO holds on every taxpayer
• Why technical expertise inside the ATO is declining - and how that affects audits, disputes, and outcomes
• The surprising distinction between incompetence, malice, and simple misunderstanding inside audit teams

⚖️ Crypto Tax & Web3

• The biggest crypto myths Harry still sees every month
• Why token wrapping, staking, airdrops, and smart contracts produce messy - often illogical - tax consequences
• Why Australia desperately needs safe harbour rules for digital assets
• The ATO’s limited understanding of crypto despite holding enormous amounts of data
• How Harry became the most recognisable crypto tax voice in Australia

🏦 Australia’s Debanking Crisis

• Harry’s own story: how AirWallex abruptly shut down Cadena’s accounts mid-transaction, freezing client money
• What this means for crypto-aligned businesses
• Why banks can quietly kill an entire industry by restricting access to payment rails

💥 The ATO’s Hard Pivot on Debt & Insolvency

• Why the ATO is aggressively chasing $55 billion of outstanding tax debt
• How director penalty notices (DPNs) and garnishees are being used faster and earlier
• Why the ATO is rejecting Small Business Restructuring Plans (SBRs) it used to accept at 15–25¢ in the dollar
• The economic consequences of forcing viable businesses into insolvency
• The quiet return of a more punitive, pre-Chris Jordan ATO culture

🏛️ The Courts: Bendel, s100A, Part IVA, and Why the ATO Is Losing More Often

• Why the ATO lost Bendel at the AAT, then the Federal Court, then the Full Federal Court
• What happened in the High Court hearing - and why the judges pushed back hard
• The deeper problem: deteriorating technical capability + courts less willing to defer to the ATO
• Why taxpayers should be paying attention as these test cases reshape trust distributions and family tax planning

📢 Personal Branding for Professionals

• How Harry turned tax - the driest topic imaginable - into a social media brand people want to watch
• The future of professional content on TikTok and LinkedIn
• Why authenticity is now a competitive advantage in law

This episode is a true insider’s map of how tax power works in Australia - from audits to crypto rules to the evolving role of the courts. If you’re a founder, adviser, accountant, lawyer, crypto investor, or just someone who gets nervous when the ATO emails you: this conversation will change how you think.

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