BEING SUMMONED TO Room 1010 is not a good thing. You wind up in this place – a small, florescent-lit room in an office tower at 250 Montgomery St. in the Financial District – when you've filed for bankruptcy protection with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court's northern California division.

Room 1010 feels like a cross between the welfare office and traffic court. Signs, in English and Spanish, reading "FBI INVESTIGATES BANKRUPTCY CRIMES" and "WEAPONS PROHIBITED" are tacked to the walls. Flanked by flags, a round, 3-D plaque embossed with the Justice Department's logo – an eagle standing atop a red-white-and-blue shield – is perched at the front of the room. Solemn people sit silently in rows of chairs with gray vinyl cushions.

On a recent afternoon, a man named David Burchard faced a crowd of about a dozen people. He's a large man with a firm but congenial manner. He wore a dark, well-tailored suit. Bankruptcies are overseen by a branch of the Justice Department called the U.S. Trustees' Office, and Burchard is the "standing trustee" for Chapter 13 bankruptcies filed in San Francisco. That means the federal government has given Burchard, a private citizen with a background in finance, the authority to probe possible abuses of the nation's bankruptcy code.

He was there that day to gently interrogate debtors who may have been bending the rules. "The purpose of this interview is to allow me to make a decision about your case, about whether I should or shouldn't refer it to a judge," he informed them.

Consumers have the choice of filing for Chapter 7, which usually takes four to six months, or Chapter 13, a more involved process that can last as long as five years. Crumbling corporations go Chapter 11. People seeking Chapter 13 protection fill out forms explaining how they got into debt, what kind of assets they possess, and how they plan to crawl out of the red.

Burchard pores over this paperwork looking for unnecessary expenses – such as a $3,600 annual cell phone bill or $600 a month spent on "entertainment" – that might keep a debtor from getting solvent. He also pokes around for hidden assets that could be hawked at auction. For Burchard, there's a profit motive at work: he pockets a percentage of any assets he uncovers and sells.

Chapter 13 debtors agree to partially repay their creditors by sending money monthly ("money orders or cashier's checks only") directly to Burchard, who then passes it on to the parties owed. After they hand over a chunk of the cash, the rest of the debt is cleared.

There are legions of broke folks in the Bay Area these days: 3,741 filed in the San Francisco court in the year leading up to this August. According to court statistics, as of this September, bankruptcy claims are up 9.9 percent across northern California. Not surprisingly, San Jose, the onetime center of the tech universe, got it the worst, with a 15.6 percent surge. In San Francisco the numbers are up more than 6 percent.

The grim-faced people assembled in Room 1010 looked like San Francisco. There were a couple of African Americans, a few whites, some Latinos, and four Asian Americans. Most were middle-aged. They came from an array of occupations: an adult-school administrator, a low-level United Airlines staffer, an employee of an Olive Garden franchise, an underemployed software engineer.

Burchard questioned Software Guy, a bespectacled, drainpipe-thin 43-year-old man with a quiet voice, about his cash flow. The computer guru told Burchard he was "trying to build a software consulting business" after leaving an established software firm. So far, the man admitted, biz wasn't exactly booming: over the past three years, he'd made less than $10,000 and amassed a K2-size pile of credit card bills.

"We have to look at the feasibility of the [bankruptcy] plan," Burchard said, worried Software Guy wouldn't be able to pay down his debt. "Can you tell me how you're going to make the payments?" Burchard hinted the consultant might have to abandon his life among the self-employed and find a new job.

The whole Q&A was over in five minutes with no indication of whether Software Guy would receive further scrutiny.

In an interview, Software Guy, who is "more than $100,000" in the hole, fleshed out the circumstances that brought him to Room 1010. "Well, I quit my job a couple of years ago thinking I'd have no trouble getting a new job," he said.

It didn't work out so well. Since the tech sector implosion of 2001, Software Guy has found it impossible to score a steady gig, despite a postgraduate education in computer science and 12 years in the field. His shitty financial situation was exacerbated by personal investments in the securities market – he held large amounts of Cisco and Lucent stock when the tech companies tanked – and the fact that he owned 12 credit cards.

A 38-year-old San Francisco woman also filing for Chapter 13 had a similar story. A freelance production hand on TV commercials, she'd made as much as $72,000 a year, but when the economy belly flopped, she watched her income plummet to $25,000. Equipped with a fistful of plastic, the woman ran up $70,000 in credit card debt.

For her, going bankrupt was a relief. "It's actually less stressful than having creditors calling me all the time and harassing me," she said.

That relief may be short-lived. Republican lawmakers have been angling to rewrite federal bankruptcy laws for several years now, unsuccessfully pushing several pieces of legislation that would make it harder to seek bankruptcy protection. Lawyer Patrick McNamara, a San Francisco bankruptcy specialist, says standing trustees like Burchard are already adopting a tougher stance toward debtors. "They have taken a much more aggressive tone during the past six months," McNamara said, pointing to one recent case in which a standing trustee got riled about the size of a family's grocery bills.

Lawrence Szabo, a bankruptcy lawyer who practices in San Francisco and Oakland, is seeing the same thing. "I think it's come down from above that the U.S. Trustees should monitor these case more closely," he told me.

Szabo is also tracking another trend: "I'm seeing more and more people whose primary debt is medical bills. These are largely people who are uninsured when they're hit with a catastrophic illness or injury."

Don't despair, though. Even in this arid economic climate, with millions of people hunting for a decent job with decent benefits, there are still some growth industries out there.