THE CODIFIED SYSTEM OF IMPUTATION OF PERFORMANCE: CURRENT PROBLEMS AND THE WAY FORWARD.

Abstract

If a creditor is owed several homogeneous debts and receives a payment insufficient to cover them all in full, the creditor has a problem. How can the creditor ascertain the debt to which the payment should be applied? There are specific regulations in different parts of current legislation that address the issue. Practical application of the general allocation procedure in articles 1172 to 1174 of the Civil Code may pose more problems than one might think upon just a cursory examination, due to certain difficulties of interpretation stemming from the Code's current wording. In this paper the procedure stipulated by law is examined and a wording is proposed that could eliminate a good many of the difficulties.