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By: JM Meyer on Fri Mar 14, 2008

You may have heard a lot about hot new employment trends in the biotech and wealth management fields, or in the oil-sands (even), but the real surging sector of the economy this year, in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, will be debt collection!

As the economy slides inch by yard closer to recession, the amount of insolvent accounts will rise, and third-party companies will be hiring more and more of those friendly voices on the telephone line (just after a pre-recorded message asking you to wait for an important announcement) on any lazy afternoon, when you might be doing your laundry, or more likely, sorting out which pieces of Grandma’s jewelry you’re going to be selling off to smelt.

According to a recent New York Times article, though, the days of the snarling, fang-toothed attack dogs clustered together in a drop-paneled room in some god-awful suburb of Chicago double-dialing may be over, as third-party companies look over their new batch of customers and realize that maybe there’s a reason they’re being sold debts at a fraction of their value. It’s more akin getting blood out of a stone to than it is to Shylock extracting his pound of flesh.

With a weak economy, there’s more debt, but less ability to pay, and sugar-coating the approach just might help extract some of those last dollars before the debt goes unpaid forever when the creditor goes bankrupt. (It’s the same principle as chatting up an elderly and ailing relative before she or he draws up your will – “just give me something to remember you by”), not to mention stave off any attempts by legislators to regulate an industry that’s become synonymous with “unsavory practices.”

Rozanne Anderson, the GC for the industry’s trade group, ACA International, said “Collectors actually care about consumers. They want them to teach consumers how to get out of debt. They’re trying to put themselves out of business.”

In a move that surely must be to promote the new and friendly face of debt collection, the ACA (American Collectors Association – don’t get it confused with the umbrella organization that oversees the finances and structure of your local branch of the Kitten-In-A-Teacup Collectors Association) opened a lobbying office in Washington, open full-time, and the ACA’s president, Robert G. Markoff, is even writing about Honest Abe Lincoln, a president who did time both as a debtor and a collections lawyer before ascending to the highest office in the land.

The National Association of Retail Collection Attorneys followed suit, hiring leading PR firm Waggener Edstrom Worldwide to fly the flag of the softer world of debt collection. The NARCA, not to be confused with the strangely older guy in your high school art class who was always asking for “doobs”, represents law firms who, rather than simply asking nicely for their debt time and time again, prefer to litigate, and, if necessary, garnish the paychecks of their, ahem, customers.

Ira F. Leibsker, a past-president of the association and a Chicago lawyer is a little less slippery-tongued than Ms. Anderson of the ACA, when he says that, really, “we’re trying to take people’s money from them. Let’s be honest.”

A 2006 projection for employment rates in debt collection estimated a 23% increase by 2016 to over half a million workers seems optimistic now (depending on your position in the industry)… With the era of re-financing one’s home and leveraging that equity to pay your bills effectively a thing of the past, you’ve got to imagine that there’s only room for growth, not to mention a rise in the amount of startlingly Kafka-esque situations wherein debt collector is pitted against debt collector.

If the humanitarian impulse swells in your bosom, the need to do right by your fellow man guides you along your career path, and you’re looking for a new opportunity in a growing industry, then debt collection just might be the thing for you, although I’d make sure I was paid up before applying first.


JM Meyer is a financial analyst and parachuting instructor living in Van Nuyes, California, and does not often pay library late fees.