Debt Collection Administrator

Before I went to college, I worked for a year as a debt collection administrator for a private debt collection agency back in Sweden. When you hear the words “debt collection,” you probably have a lot of negative images popping up in your head. You are probably imagining some large, intimidating man coming to your house, taking all your stuff, and threatening to sell your property. This scenario is very far from reality. Debt collection is actually quite undramatic and most debts are repaid long before anyone has to come and take your belongings.

Let me first break down for you how the industry works. If a person buys a good or service from a company, and after several reminders still fails to pay for that good or service, then the company will hand over the matter to a private debt collection agency. If this private debt collection agency is still unable to convince the customer to pay, then the private agency will hand over the matter to the government’s debt collection agency. This government agency has the authority to take money directly out of your wage every month and to take possession of your belongings, and potentially your home, and force you to sell them. The goal of the private debt collection agency is therefore to help the customer pay for the good or service that he/she received, before the government gets involved and things could get ugly.

The debt collection administrator position consists of two main duties.

·         Creating repayment plans to help clients repay their debts.

·         Investigating debt claims when clients deny having made a purchase.

Below, I will tell you more about what each of these duties entail.

Creating Repayment Plans

The main objective of a debt collection administrator is essentially to help people who are in debt to repay what they owe. Therefore, creating a repayment plan that works both for the client and the agency is very important. A typical scenario would be a client contacting me, either by phone or email, to tell me that they are aware of the debt but that they cannot repay the full amount at once. I would then go ahead to try to figure out how much they would be able to pay per month. After agreeing on a monthly amount that works for both parties, I would set up a repayment plan so that the client could pay off the debt step-by-step. These repayment plans would range from as little as $20 per month up to $2,000, depending on the client and the debt itself.

Many times, clients also called to negotiate a deal with me. This was probably my favorite part of the job, both because I enjoyed the process of negotiating, as well as the fact that it greatly helped the clients. Old debts, which had been sitting in our system for years, had often doubled or tripled in amount due to fees and other costs. Because of this, debts could grow too big for our clients to ever repay them. By cutting them a deal, I would help the client get rid of a large debt, which ultimately meant that we were also getting paid.

Investigating Debt Claims

Clients would sometimes call me to contest a certain debt claim. Most often they would deny having ever made a purchase at all or that they never received the product. In these cases, it was my job to dig deeper into the matter and try to find out what had actually happened. I would then usually contact the company, from which the customer had supposedly purchase the product, to get more information about what he/she had purchased and how. Even though many of the clients strongly denied having made a purchase, I would often find that the company who had sold them the product had clear evidence to support their claim. In Sweden we have an equivalent to the Social Security Number, called a Personal Identity Number, which makes it very easy to identify people. These interactions with our clients could sometimes get a little heated – I have had to deal with the occasional bomb threat. However, most of the time I was able to work out the issues in a calm and undramatic matter.