Any lawyers here-r.e collection agency

[dweymer]

Any lawyers want to offer some free advice here?
Short story:
Changed terms of an equity line in March, and was informed I had a collection account on my credit report(the only negative item) which was placed in Dec.(I check once a year in June usually)

So after going a few rounds with the collection agency I get a handwritten ledger showing a missed appt. fee of 30 and a collection fee of 50. This is the only written evidence of the debt, which is from 10-xx-04.

Any help?

[schamp]

I would file a dispute with the agency you had pull the report and go have a talk with the doctor. I would get his attention along with his office manager. Good luck.

[dweymer]

Already filed a dispute with all reporting agencies. All they do is get the collection agency to verify it's me.

[schamp]

I would want them to prove you had approved the debt, signed something. This may be on the paperwork you signed at the doctors office so be careful. You might be able to pay the 30.00 directly to the doctors office. They might not take it since they referred it out to the collection agency. I would most likely not pay it and talk with the doctor, he may not know this is going on, then if not removed leave it alone. Maybe a couple of points overall on your credit score for a couple of years. If you up around 800 should not be a problem. I have left a doctors office after having an appointment and waiting in the waiting room for over 1 hour and a half. Maybe I should have sent them a bill. On the other hand, you may have just blew off the appointment and have signed something agreeing to pay for missed appointments. The only thing a Doctor has to sell is his time. If the doctors office is a "on time office" where a 1:00 appointment is actually 1:00. In which case you owe the money and should pay it. Here, I would want to know if they ever sent you a bill or just turned it over to the collection agency. You might be able to pay the office and have them get the collection item back from the agency.

[Rot 911]

I'd just pay the $80, not worth the time and effort to dispute the debt.

[dweymer]

I would have loved to just pay it; however, the collection agency placed the marker on my credit report before asking me to pay it. I had never heard anything on this until march. If I pay it now, it will show up as a settled collection, how big a deal that is I don't know. But I do know I'll pay higher interest because of it, my recent info was like 2 points higher on my equity line because of this one item, that's worth the time.

[Rick Lee]

Tread carefully here. Sometimes, after a collection has been on your credit report for a while and gone dormant, paying it off can reactivate it and ding your score. If it's a collection agency action, I don't believe you can pay the doctor, as the doctor has already sold the account to the collection agency for pennies on the dollar. The collection agency now gets to keep whatever they can get out of you and will often settle for the break even amount, consider the matter closed and report it as satisfied to the reporting bureaus.

I am in a bind now with a Simply Wireless store that sent me an "early termination" bill for $400 two days before it was due and about a month after I had paid a $175 early term. fee to Cingular for switching to Verizon. I absolutely refuse to pay this. Now a collection agency is hassling me. I tell them they got take by buying the account, as Simply Wireless knew I'd never pay them and I will never pay the collection agency either. My credit score is now 743 and there is no mention of this matter on there. But Trans Union tells me I have to wait until it shows up before I can dispute it or put a note on my report that I dispute this charge. So I just have to wait it out.

[Christien]

Well, maybe I can offer a perspective from the other side of the fence. We send customers to collections all the time. We don't sell the account to the collection agency - they keep 38% of whatever they collect as their commission, so we usually trump the amount up as much as possible under the contract. (late fees, etc.) If they don't collect, we don't collect, but nor do we pay.

We ALWAYS attempt to notify the customer before sending accounts to the collection agency. If we can make verbal contact over the phone, that's the best way, but usually we send a letter. Often these letters come back with a "MOVED" notice stuck to it, and without a forwarding address, we can't get in touch with them. There's no way we're going to spend money on a skip trace to track these people down, because we rarely get any money out of them by the time they're in collections territory. The collection agency has access to lots of resources for finding people that we don't, so let them spend their time and money on it.

Once in a while, someone will try to take out a loan or get a credit card or something, and will find out about the collection activity only then. They call us all pissed off, and I always explain that we tried to contact them but if you move and don't update your address with is, this is exactly what's going to happen. It's in the contract. They try to make a deal with us, but I always refer it back to the collection agency, because if they pay us directly, we have to remit 38% to the collection agency, so it's easier to just have it come through the agency. Plus, if we just took the money and didn't notify (and pay) the agency, it'll still be on their report. We do usually cut them a deal, though.

If I were you I'd check any documentation from the dr. you may have, or request it from them (or via the collection agency). There's no way we'd submit an account to the collection agency without the debt being fully legal and legit, as provided for in the contracts we have with customers. I can't see a dr's office being any less diligent.

[speedracing944]

I am not a lawyer. Far from it... But we had a dispute with a hospital emergency room. Our daughter put her mouth on a Workes drain cleaner bottle and we were worried about burns. After waiting in the ER for 1.5 hours without medical attention we informed the desk we were leaving and left. They billed us for the visit. ~$200. It was sent to collections who tried to collect but we just refused due to the fact no services were rendered. It ended up on our credit report but it was the only black eye. It didn't stop us from getting the best rate on our home mortgage 3 years later.

Now 10 years later they still don't have our money and it is eliminated from our credit report.

Speedy

[Rick Lee]

Speedy, do you know how much that collection lowered your FICO score? I am curious about what's coming to me. I've heard it will be a 60 pt. drop as soon as it hits, but will climb back up 5-10 pts. a month thereafter.

FWIW, most mortgage companies now only care about judgements and tax liens. Most other collections, and especially medical ones, get ignored.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Rick Lee is correct. If the debt is from '04, it's probably not affecting your score all that much. Best thing to do at this point is ignore it. As he correctly said, once you initiate contact on the account, it shows up as "new activity" and it will be far more damaging. Yes, this is really how our wonderful system is set up. Incredible, isn't it?

[Moneyguy1]

Gotta love Doctors and Attorneys. They set rates, charge clients and there is little recourse. And both groups are self-regulating........

Not all, mind you, but the opportunity is there. When my Mom was in her last weeks in a home, the medical insurance company was paying a Doctor who was not on my Mom's list of physicians. He would go to nursing homes, look i on various patients and than submit a bill to the insurance carier or the individual's family. It took a while, but we caught him and he is no longer able to bill medicare or medicaid.

[Superman]

I think credit reporting agencies should be held liable for any inaccuracies they report. My guess is that their cavalier attitude is due to some legal liability immunization they enjoy. If they could always be held financially responsible for any and all hardships they cause due to an inaccuracy in their reports, then I'd guess they'd be more responsive.

So much for relying on Market Forces to ensure wonderful customer service.

[Rick Lee]

I don't know how it would be fair to hold them accountable for errors, if the error was committed by someone who reports to the credit bureaus. And the flip side to that is they could be extra dilligent in finding everything that could possibly lower your score. FWIW, most lenders will take the middle score of three or the lower of two.

[Christien]

Remember too that the vast majority of people collection agencies deal with are deadbeats. I work in sub-prime financing (which is a nice euphamism for people with bad credit) so I talk to a lot of people that are on the crappy end of collections. Most of them deserve to be there, to be quite frank.

Sure the odd person gets caught up in there that really shouldn't be there, but if collection agencies had to be as diligent as has been suggested, nothing would ever get done.

[Superman]

Originally posted by Christien

Sure the odd person gets caught up in there that really shouldn't be there, but if collection agencies had to be as diligent as has been suggested, nothing would ever get done.

This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's the same as saying that lenders' interests are more important than borrowers'. Commerce is more important than people.

I have recently dealt with drug testing. I noticed that Medical Review Officers (the people that actually make the decision whether a drug test is positive, negative, dipute, adulterated, etc) generally do not have a very good attitude toward donors. Sure, I understand they deal with druggies who are attempting to conceal their behaviors but I do not give them a "pass" to be rude. Donors......and borrowers.....should be treated with respect. I have heard many many many stories, from non-deadbeat people, about the ferocious headache of trying to get a bogus remark removed from a credit report. When I become emperor, credit reporting agencies will feel some significant potenntial liability beginning the moment they get credible information from a borrower than a remark on the credit report is erroneous. At that point, their vigor would be directed toward exonerating the borrower if that is appropriate. Currently, there appears to be no vigor toward the borrower. That's just plain wrong.

Somebody mentioned that holding them accountable could cause them to look more vigorously for bad credit information. It seems to me their existing focus on this goal is already plenty high.

[Rick Lee]

Supe, if you can think up a better system than the one we have, I'm sure some investors would help you out. As it is, the FICO scoring system has been pretty accurate in predicting loan performance and measuring borrowers' ability and willingness to repay debts. That lenders have constantly lowered their FICO requirements because of "compensating factors" does not change the fact that you can't polish a turd. And that's a large part of what caused the subprime implosion. When you start getting into 550 and below FICO scores with multiple bankruptcies and barely a clean payment history on a single trade line, well that goes to character. I've only seen a very few credit reports that were totally hosed because of a divorce or some one-time event. Bad credit scores take some work to make that bad.