Elected Official Considerations

It is always an elected official who oversees the local collections effort. In small counties it is relegated to an employee as an "other duty as required," and not much time is focused on the effort. 20 years ago there was an Office of Court Administration tasked with managing a "Collect." According to their staff at the time many jurisdictions were achieving collections rates below 10% and there was a legislative mandate for counties to improve collections. While the program was bureaucratic and involved unpopular audits, it worked. i-Plow was the first and only company to participate and develop Government Collections & Compliance dedicated to improving the effectiveness of government collectors.

There are many factors that impact overall collections, but our some of customers regularly achieve plan effectiveness rates of over 80%. We say plan effectiveness because we only hold collectors accountable for the cases for which they manage plans. The county's overall collection rate may be lower if some courts do not participate. Our analysis is represented in the Plan Performance and Expectations Report. Even the name of the program, Government Collections & Compliance reveals our special focus: of course we care about collections, but compliance, making sure the orders of the court are followed, is equally important to us.

If you ask, some jurisdictions will report 99.5%. That is because it is local policy that a case is not closed until all fees, fines, and court costs have been paid. Since they only report on open cases, our question is, how do they explain the .5%?

The biggest question of all: Should there be a centralized collections office supporting all courts or individual implementations. i-Plow, of course, supports both. But it is a simple fact that a centralized office is by far the most effective way to manage collections. The argument in the past was that courts have different requirements. That's why Government Collections & Compliance was designed to be configurable to the court level. You see, a collections process is essentially a complex scheduling system and the differences in courts are essentially differences in scheduling and the verbiage of the notifications. You certainly don't use the word, conviction, in a civil court and a dedicated drug court will have it's own milestones. i-Plow doesn't care. We are not selling you our process, we are automating yours. We can even support more than one process in a single court. The El Paso collectors have defined 67 different court processes (one of them is so strict, they don't notify the defendant, they notify the judge!).

While one implementation supports 67 courts in El Paso, there are other instances where a County has multiple implementations. We discount additional implementations, but from our perspective, each one is like another county. This is because our "customer" is the Collections Manager. One person who defines the rules for us (we know their not the ones who make the rules*, what we call the system administrator. What we can't do is make one implementation behave the way that two administrators need it to.

So whether your a member of Commissioners' Court, a District or County Judge, District or County Clerk, Treasurer, Justice of the Peace, Constable or Sheriff, we look forward to discussing this with you further.