actually, most government collections aren’t outsourced much. Maryland is most likely a rigged ‘outsourcing’ like they did with the tobacco settlement case which got handed over to Peter Angelos for a $1B commission. It’s been a fairly open secret that Angelos’ firm owns large parts of the Maryland state legislature which is how got the tobacco deal outsourcing (even though Maryland could have done it in-house since the work was mostly already done) as well as killing off legislation which would exempt certain industries from various tort claims and medical malpractice claims.
I’ll admit that my contact with this industry is mostly about 5 years old since I stopped bothering with that sector somewhere around then. But other than one program with the IRS I’ve not heard of any big movement nationwide.
Any mediocre collection agency could collect more money for any city on parking tickets alone that the city makes by just issuing tickets and waiting until somebody gets arrested before they enforce the tickets and exact payment.
The bigger the government agency the harder it is to get any outside help. The politicians (which are mostly lefties) don’t want to outsource anything which isn’t unionized and there are no union collection agencies or finance companies. And those politicians can’t imagine how bad it would look if some tiny company dramatically increased the collection rates and the government schlubs who were supposed to be doing the job were made to look bad. And heaven help them if that ‘private contractor’ did something wrong and somebody wanted to sue.
I watched the District Attorney of Los Angeles County (second largest county in the US) file liens against bank accounts of two individuals who were NOT the subject of the child support orders he was seeking to enforce. I could tell them were the right name/wrong guy immediately (especially since in both cases the correct guy was black and the guy who got targetted was white) with about $0.35 worth of data. Los Angeles County got sued but good and deserved it. But it only took one of the LA County Commissioners to prevent me from even taking on the worst cases and getting them money from ‘deadbeat dads’ just as test cases and getting them the money they claimed was due.
Only Dallas County in TX ever admitted it was smart enough to have somebody do it for them. But even then they could only do it for certain types of cases.
And at the same time, Bill Clinton in 1996 issued an executive order allowing the Dept of Treasury via the Secret Service to search the accounts of all US banks to find any accounts held under the name or SSN of any person on the list of ‘deadbeat dads’ and report those accounts to Treasury (who would presumably then report it to the state where the deadbeat was being sought). In every small bank in America, they either had to search all their accounts for these tens and tens of thousands of names and SSNs OR (and this is the fun part) the banks would have to turn over ledgers of ALL account holders identities to Treasury so Treasury could search the records themselves. No mention of the 4th Amendment by Janet Reno at the time and most GOP members of Congress knew nothing about this.
I watched Downey Savings Bank in So. California send over big boxes of paper which contained the identities and account numbers of thousands of their active accounts because they lacked the funds and/or time to search all their files against this massive list (to which there is no compatible system in most banks to do this since it’s not a normal task).
So, in short, it’s a goat f@%*. Governments don’t know how to collect money or find it when debtors try to hide it. And most government entities simply don’t reallly even want to try. It is tragic and/or comical. But it is the absolute fastest way to solve budget problems which doesn’t require raising taxes. It works for hospitals and other quasi-public agencies as well. Typically, the ‘receivables’ department is one person who answers the phone and mails out statements