CLH (ASX) Ann: Appointment of Administrators

Originally posted by spider5: ↑

In principle I agree with you - if you obtain credit then you should respect the lenders trust in you and the general need within our society to pay it back. In the end lack of debt repayment is shouldered by us all in increased prices, interest rates and cost of services. However debt collection is just not that simple. Their are borrowers who deliberately set out to fraud lenders, borrowers who when faced with some form of adversity decide that they are victims and will not pay back loans or even negotiate and others who genuinely want to pay but cannot due to circumstances completely out of their control. I have also found borrowers who entrusted their partners to look after the family financial affairs to find that the partner was gambling the income and stalling payments to loans by lying to lenders about family sickness etc. That is just a sample of what can be a myriad of problems associated with debt collecting. Getting to the bottom of these problems takes a great degree of patience and tenacity by the collector often to find at the end of many hours of investigation nothing is retrieved for the effort. As a collector your prying and investigating can often label you with terms such as "scumbag etc" but all you are doing even in the beginning is trying to establish who is lying or why the debtor has stopped paying and will not even contact you as to why. In my past life as a debt collector I have met them all and I could write a great novel about those years and the events which have caused me to become a person with little trust in others and become a huge cynic about courts and justice. It is just not that simple but I do agree with your ethical stance.

Expand

ok thanks for giving a considered response rather than the usual moronic "pay your debts" type response. I still think the practice should be outlawed though... ultimately it's none of the debt collector's business who can pay what or what the truth is, they should never have stuck their nose in. They are just opportunists all in pursuit of a quick buck. I would argue that costs for all borrowers are driven up by the selling of these debts on the cheap to the ambulance chasers.... if the banks couldn't offload their balance sheet issues on the cheap they would be forced to take more consideration in their lending practices. Safer lending means less bad debt means lower cost to the consumer on an individual basis. For the banks though the AGGREGATE lending will be lower, so their ever demanding greedy shareholders won't like that.