Confessions of a collector

Clarify the Position..long

Most of our cases and trust me we do file 75 per month, do go to small claims. Most of the items are for checks, which have been written within the last 4 months and after appeals for business tax and code enforcement liens. What this means is that the cases that have not worked out a payment plan or who requested and got an appeal, but still refuse to pay, we take these to court.

Our jurisdictional limit is 5k in small claims, because we are a public agency and located in CA, we can file as many of these suits that we want to. What this meant in the past is that we would treat a $250 item the same as a $2500 item. (which was stupid by the way)

We don't really violate the FDCPA or the FCRA, because of these reasons:

A majority of the time, we send a copy of the initial check or an itemization of the violations in the initial communication.

Upon contact, the debtor is informed of their appeals process, ie police reports, property sold reports (title reports or sellers contract), and just by the nature of the debt, most of the debtors do agree to the appeals and have their time to dispute the debt with a third party who are not employees or have any interest in the outcome. Upon decision either for the debtor for my municipality, the debtor is still given 30 days to dispute the decision. After this is done, and the decision is not overturned, the debt is considered viable.

We don't report debt to the CB, because once again, we have an inventory of over 35k cases. This is both a timely process and with validation, causes too much of a backlog. What we do is do take these items to court after all appeals have been heard or if you are not able to pay for your check in a timely manner.

Let me be very clear, we are very litigious. I file over 50 claims a month and have cases in court all the way in Feb 2008. We don't hire a lawyer unless the amount is over $7500. We do prefer voluntary payments, but make no mistake, we will sue in small claims and we do appear in the 341 meetings to affirm certain debts, such as housing improvment loans, etc that were granted.

So, I don't posture, what I do is state the reality of my job. Just as when I worked for the IRS, I didn't threaten. I worked the inventory, either you wanted an installment agreement or you were just going to argue a moot point. You filed the tax return, I didn't or you did not file it and you were between a rock and a hard place. What I like to promote is to pay the debt, even if it takes you 6 years, just pay it to avoid court or in the case of the IRS, to avoid a levy.

I am human, I have bills, sometimes it can get overwhelming with kids and more responsibilities. I may pay all of my cable bill this month, and pay the bare mininum for the telephone bill. I just removed some extras from the cable to make it affordable, but I do know these must be paid. What I don't like is for a minimun payment to my BofA to be a joke after being hit with the interest.

Oh, to really clear, we don't charge interest. The only interest is what is granted from the judgment and this is called the judgment interest and is capped at 10% per year. Before a judgment, the amount on the bill is the amount due.