Provision for Bad Debt and Recovery

I have never had any of my bad debt written off but when my father passed away from cancer 7 years ago some of his outstanding credit card debt was.

Just makes me think if credit card companies and other businesses have some sort of provision for bad debt. I know our family business counted on every penny we generated we didn’t have a special bad debt expense journal entry in our accounting books. Would a large accounts receivable for bad debt be considered a tax write off for a business?

When I was operating my taxi-cab business I had some bad debt write offs but it was not that much a very low profit to bad debt ratio. Bad debt recovery was on my mind but in the end having a few thousand dollars owning to me was not worth the hassle of trying to get it back but maybe I could have used it as a tax write off. When my taxi-cab business failed when I began to get tired of it I didn’t try to get my bad debt written off. I spent the next 2 years making payments out of pocket to pay off the business loans that I was given.