Debt agreements have not been a profitable operation for Fox Symes, the dominant player in this industry, since reforms were introduced to clean up the industry three years ago.Fox Symes reported a slump in profits for the year ended 30 June 2010 as government stimulus payments and lower interest rates limited the numbers of indebted consumers seeking assistance.The number of new debt agreements signed was six per cent lower in 2009/10 than during the previous year, although Fox Symes retains 51 per cent market share.Rising interest rates in the first half of calendar 2010 "had a short-term impact on the profitability of our home loan lending division," said executive director Tim Maher in a statement.Profit after tax was $7.5 million, down 15 per cent from $8.8 million in 2009.The company reported that since amendments to the Bankruptcy Act in 2007, its debt agreement operations have been subsidised by its other operations in factoring finance and mortgage refinancing.Fox Symes has built a home loan book of more than $200 million in the last two years, funded by Westpac. The company wants to triple that loan book within three years.Westpac also increased its funding facility for Fox Symes' factoring finance operations in 2010 from $10 million to $25 million.That lending business now seems to have largely saved Fox Symes.The 2007 reforms prevented debt agreement administrators from charging insolvent consumers an up-front fee to a parity arrangement. Those parity fees average $100 per month for four-and-a-half years, reported Fox Symes yesterday.However under the previous arrangements, debt agreement administrators collected their fees first and hence held no financial interest in the ongoing success of the debt agreement. Now the fees stop flowing when the debt agreement fails.Part nine debt agreements, designed for insolvent consumers with low incomes and few assets, are notoriously difficult to maintain and have high failure rates.Fox Symes' share price fell more than six per cent yesterday to 30 cents per share after the full-year results were announced.