Shortly before国会采取了一项措施来帮助减少个人保证欺诈, an appellate court decision seemed to make it more difficult for contractors who use individual surety bonds on public project bids to compete.

在10月初的裁决中，Anthem Builders诉美国退伍军人事务部提出的，提交了美国联邦索赔法院，一名法官维持了一名VA合同官的裁决，该裁定发现个人担保人“不反应”，并拒绝了竞标提交债券的承包商。

The bid was for work at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Francisco. Anthem argued in its appellate complaint that it had submitted a lower bid and was initially selected for the award, and that the exclusion of Anthem based on the bid guarantee was “arbitrary, capricious, and unsupported.”

The bond Anthem submitted was supported by an irrevocable trust receipt (ITR) issued by First Mountain Bancorp for the penal sum of the bond and an ITR supported by $30 million in certificates of deposit, issued by HSBC Bank and held in escrow by a business called First Mountain Bancorp.

Anthem的申诉声称，签约官员拒绝债券的理由是，投标债券的资产不足。当被问及VA承包官员是否会拒绝包含个人担保债券作为政策问题的投标时，一位发言人写道：“目前，尚未决定进行任何政策更改。”

辩护个人担保人

The VA did not respond to other questions about the case, but the person who backed the bond, George Gowen, defended the use of individual surety.

“This impacts the building industry. Without individual sureties, things don't get built,” said Gowen, who is director of First Mountain Bancorp. “There's not enough corporate surety capability to fund all these jobs. And without individual sureties stepping up to the plate, a lot of jobs would not get done.”

Gowen added that he had already done what was needed to make the disputed bonds responsible. “We made some wording changes to our documents, that's all that was done.”

2007年，Gowen was a plaintiff in a lawsuit with former individual surety Edmund C. Scarborough against the U.S. Army and the National Association of Surety Bond Producers, which had issued warnings about possible surety fraud. The lawsuit was eventually settled and its terms never disclosed.

Congress recently adopted a new defense spending authorization bill that contained a little-noticed amendment that should eliminate much of the fraud that has characterized individual surety bonds and expand the Small Business Administration’s flexibility in backing bonds for small contractors. The surety measure tightens up the rules for using individual sureties on federal projects by requiring the assets backing the bonds to be real and deposited into an account that is in the care of the federal government.