A debt may be exempted from discharge if the debtor has, within one year before filing his bankruptcy petition, made a fraudulent transfer. 11 U.S.C. 727(a)(2). This decision holds that the one-year period is not a statute of limitations and since it operates to limit discharges, a key feature of bankruptcy, it is not subject to equitable tolling. So, in this case, the creditor’s complaint to avoid discharge was properly dismissed because the debtor had made his fraudulent transfer more than a year before his current bankruptcy proceeding, even though he had filed and dismissed two prior bankruptcy proceedings within a year of the fraudulent transfer.
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Ikuta, J.); June 9, 2016; 2016 WL 3201236