I have understood that in free market there is room for people to offer a service such as debt collections. There will always be people who default on loans and/or moneys owed. Therefore larger businesses who have 1000's of accounts recievable would have a difficult time to manage a high volume of defaulted accounts, ending up costing the majority of honest customers more money. However, I still do not believe that any company should be able to walk up to a collections agency, present a file folder, claim that certain monies are due and the collection should then just call up the person and say hey give us this money. There should be due process, if it is deemed true and the money is owed, and the deadbeat has no stance or valid reason for witholding payment, then so be it allow the collections agency to make life difficult for the deadbeat. However, if the person being collected from asks for a simple thing like a detailed bill for the last month of services it should be in the collections agency mandate to help acquire this or any other document that would help resolve the matter in a positive fashion. If the company refuses to provide proof beyond a non detailed invoice, or if the company is being non cooperative in the resolution on the situation and maintain a hard line stance the collections agent should be paid a small retainer fee and not remove themselves from the matter, the company should be made to be held to present it's case before a court, just as it for the consumer whoes only recourse is to go to court in a situation like this.
Now if it's gone to court and there is still non payment, of course the collections would be free to be used again.
I just think that corporate america should also be made to hold their end of the deal. What I am saying is if they don't hold up to their end of the bargain,the contract is already broken so why should I continue to keep my part of the bargain? Just to be a nice guy?. An example I can cite is my parents suscribe to a cable company, for 3 weeks the cable grid of like 3 square blocks was cut, I don't knnow for what reason, non the less we had no TV, We didn't care much as we only watched about an hour a day(this is the time when kids actualy played outside) but my parents recieved a bill that month and there was no deduction for the outage. When they called to see why not the cable company told them that it was not big enough on the grid and the mother company did not recognize the failure of the system, therefore billing was not going to be affected. I remember being really upset and telling my parents not to pay that bill but they did. My mom said that when her friends called and said that they wouldn't pay a pro-rated equivalant amount for the 3 weeks without service, they had been told that the collections agent were already waiting and the billing wasn't contestable. Now the outage wasn't big enough to be registered by the mother company but they were expecting a backlash. I must also mention that there was only one service provider in my township. Then there was my expample that I cited in a prior post about a bloated cell phone bill and my experience being placed in collections.
I guess that when I wrote about collection agencies in my first note, I took a stance on a very narrow point of view. I wrote it from one personal experience, that ended up being quite negative with a collections agency and projected this single experience to the lot. I guess that the problem I had is maybe is not a not common, the exception if you will, but I fear that it could get out of control. My writing had a definite bias to it and I apologize if it offended anybody.
I also am not of the opinion that every processing done by a collection agency should be sent to the credit bureau, If it is deemed legitimate that the moneys were witheld with reason, that steps have been taken by both parties to rectify the situation in a timely manner and that resttitution in full has been made, I think there is no reason for involving the credit bureau, and also the collections agencies should not use the threat of destroying credit ratings as a means of coersion.
Cheers,
Eric...