Individual surety bond
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Individual surety bond
Federal projects usually come with surety bond requirements. They prefer to have bonds from approved surety companies. However, in many cases, individuals are allowed to act as sureties so that principals can meet the bonding requirements and bid for these federal projects. Many a times, contractors with their credit standing do not qualify for getting bonds from established surety companies. This prevents these small contractors from bidding for federal projects. Thus, to improve competition and to allow these small and medium contractors to bid, federal agencies has allowed the individual surety bond. Individual surety bond is issued by having the individual who is acting as a surety to pledge his assets in to an escrow account which is to be held in the name of the contractor. To be eligible for an individual surety bond, the applicant must have been rejected by a bonding company first. The assets which are acceptable for issuance of an individual surety bond are cash, irrevocable letter of credits, certificates of deposits or assets which can be readily marketed. Other forms of assets which are also considered while issuing an individual surety bond include stocks and bonds which are trading in the different American stock exchanges, U.S. securities etc. How these assets are valued depends on the type of asset. For example, in case of stocks, the value is considered to be ninety percent of the 52 week low price for the stock. Assets which are unacceptable for issuance of individual surety bond are mainly those which are difficult to sell. These may include certain types of real estate or even jewellery whose value may fluctuate a lot. Another prerequisite for issuance of individual surety bond is an affidavit from the individual acting as the surety stating the assets, their market values and all other details. The surety also needs to give records of all bonds issued by him as a surety in the last three years. The individual surety bond program was set up as per Miller’s Act to act as an alternative to expensive and difficult to get sureties from companies and thus provide opportunities to smaller enterprises to win federal contracts. However, the level of safeguards in case of an individual surety bond is much less when compared to the ones issued by corporates. For example, the bonding companies will not provide surety for companies which are financially unstable. However, these companies may take the individual surety bond route. It is because of this that fraud cases are very rampant in these scenarios and every year, a lot of fraud cases are found in the federal procurement procedure.