This is an open letter to my (now-non?) friends in the Collection Agency and Debt purchasing industry.

You may not have noticed it, but you folks are getting some pretty bad press recently. All of it, not just much of it, well deserved and brought on by your own excesses and how you inflict yourselves on people like me.

You know who I am. Your target – the “debtor.”

I am the one you keep calling – legally between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. at night. The one you are sending those “dunning” letters to; the one you sometimes refer to among yourselves as “the deadbeat,” or “slug,” or … worse.

Well, I am tired of being held in this fashion, and I humbly request that you no longer label me a “debtor.”

I am a citizen.

I am a father, a husband, a wife, a mother, a grandparent, a student. It happens that I owe money, on accounts that are extremely past-due, and am stretched from payday to payday.

Once I was called a customer. A valued one, at that. And then I came to be labeled as a “consumer” and didn’t quite command the same level of respect. Further along, I became “past due,” then a “problem account.”

At the end of this dis-assembly line of pain, you people showed up and I became a debtor. That is quite a convenient title for you to assign me. After all, no one would treat a customer or a citizen in the way you treat me.

I don’t envy you your job, I want you to know. And I do respect those among you who are chasing down legitimate debt which hasn’t been through the debt-resale market a half dozen times where my unpaid receivable was purchased for just pennies on the dollar.

You bottom feeders, who buy and pursue debt “out of statute” or which have no credible backup, are despicable. You back up the court system with lawsuits that you know I will not show up to dispute (whether because of my ignorance, fear or the time and money it takes from me), falsify papers, and then report me to credit bureaus to further drive a stake into my financial heart.

$110 Billion Dollars in Credit Card and other debt you will be purchasing this year alone!

You range in sophistication from fly-by-nights to wall-street-backed investors! Like vermin, you scurry about from debt crevasse to debt crevasse to search out the vulnerable. You are very big business. That delicious “spread” between the purchase cost tens of thousands of dollars in technology and talent you must expend to “recover” that loss makes it all worthwhile.

One of your brethren, Arrow Financial Services which was at one time the country’s largest debt buyer, was acquired by Sallie Mae in 2004 – making this student lender the nation’s largest collection agency! And now, you are making even our children into debtors – “educated serfs” to support this industry’s greed for profit-at-any-cost.

How dare you.

You bankers, wall-streeters and negligent government people have even turned my beautiful country into a “debtor” nation – of major proportions.

As defined by the U.S. Treasury, there are two calculations for debt. “Debt Held by the Public” being U.S. Treasury securities held by institutions outside the United States Government, and “Gross Debt” which includes intra-government obligations such as the Social Security Trust Fund.

As of July 28, 2010, the “Total Public Debt Outstanding” was approximately 93% of our annual GDP of $13.3 Trillion. The “Debt held by the Public” was some 60% of this, and “Inter-governmental Debt” being 32%.

What are you “bill collectors” going to do about THAT mess? Foreclose on the White House? Put the entirety of our country into a Debtor’s Prison?

That last reference is not a laughing matter. In your own, ingenious and devious ways, your industry is attempting to bring that Middle Ages institution back into existence.

The Minnesota newspaper, Star Tribune, this year ran a video interview “Debtor Prison Returns to the U.S.” in which reporter Glenn Howatt discovered that “Creditors are becoming more aggressive about old debt…and when they (the debtors) ignore a court judgment the (bill collector) has a right to get a warrant for your arrest.”

He described one woman, arrested over a $250 JC Penney Credit Card bill, who was processed through the jail system – complete with having to don an orange jail suit – after being hauled in by a Sheriff’s deputy.

“They (the collection agency) manipulated the policeman into being their enforcer,” the unhappy debtor complained.  But, it is all legal, all by the book, and all at the taxpayer’s expense and not borne by the debt collector.

“That’s not supposed to be their job…they have more important things to do,” she lamented.

Would JC Penney have put this person in jail? Of course not. They just enable the debt purchaser, as a surrogate, to perform this unconscionable and unsocial act. That debt purchaser has very little interest in anything other than profiting off the original creditor’s credit loss.

Here is my plea to the Bill Collector

You could come to the “other side.” You could show backbone and refuse to pick up the phone to continue to harass your less-fortunate fellow citizen. Are you aware that there are “debt collectors” who have become heroes?

One such person is Jacquie Reynolds (?) who went onto YouTube to let the world know why she had just been “released” from her job as a collector for the Bank of America.

Working as a Customer Service representative (the corporate code word for bill collector) for a brief stint in 2009, she was a top performer in her department. Until she began to feel that “there was something inherently evil in my job.”

“I’ll never forget one cardholder,” she relates. This was a 24-year-old single mother who had just lost her own mom and her husband (all in the same year) and has learned that she had cancer.

“She told me she couldn’t afford the 29.99% interest she was being charged, the late fees of $35 each time she was late or paid less than the amount due. I couldn’t put her on our (debt relief) program because she did not have enough income. It wasn’t up to the Bank of America to help her figure out how get out of debt.”

She went on to relate further horror stories…but, as a “bill collector” reading this, you really don’t want to hear stories. You only want to hear when you can expect ‘the check in the mail.”

Much to Jacquie’s credit, she quit that job, saying “At the end of the day, I did the right thing, and I am sure that God will bless me.”

Ah yes…Jesus – what would He say about us “debtors?” Well, that will be the subject of a full chapter in Written Off – America and Americans when it comes out this fall.

In the meantime, Mr. or Ms. Bill Collector, if you continue to call me a D—-r, I will surely continue to call you B——-s. Care to renegotiate the relationship?