Treasury Department Moves to Hire More PCAs for Non-Tax Debts

The U.S. Department of
Treasury (Treasury) released a request for proposal last month for the
collection of non-tax debts, coinciding with a major announcement in the ARM
industry that four firms have
been hired to collect taxes for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), a
unit of Treasury. 

While the decision to
award the IRS tax collection contract to four firms was announced through an
IRS press release linked within the article last week, news of the start of
this new procurement, issued through Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service,
was not as forthcoming.

The RFP’s issue date
is September 13^th, but a search on both FedBizOpps (the Federal
clearinghouse for procurement information) and on major search engines against
the title and solicitation number of the RFP produce no results.  The
solicitation is restricted to firms that are on the U.S. General
Services Administration (GSA) schedule for debt collection, and was released on
GSA’s eBuy website. 

Further, the
opportunity cautions offerors that submissions by firms without five years of
experience providing debt collection services for non-tax Federal debts on a
large scale and national level will not be further evaluated.

The four firms also
selected by IRS, CBE Group (Cedar Falls, Iowa), ConServe (Fairport, N.Y.),
Performant (Livermore, Calif.) and Pioneer (Horseheads, N.Y.), have serviced
this contract since the last procurement held in 2011.  While tax
collection privatization policies at the IRS have waffled over the years,
non-tax collection efforts by private collection agencies (PCAs) have been
continuous since at least 1998.

In 2012, MyGovWatch.com,
a clearinghouse for documents and intelligence not generally
available to the public for all government
collection contracts, sued Treasury when it balked at providing contract
pricing information and a list of companies that submitted an offer in response
to the 2011 solicitation.  A Federal judge later summarily ruled in favor
of the website.

Placements under the
contract originate from more than 40 different Federal agencies, and are
broadly characterized as fines, fees, overpayments, loans, penalties, grants,
employee advances, and miscellaneous debts.  Slightly more than half are
commercial.  Procurement documents indicate that, during Federal fiscal
year 2015, Treasury placed more than 360,000 accounts with PCAs with an average
balance close to $20,000.  Over the last five fiscal years, it has
averaged 449,000 placements per year.

Bids are currently due
on October 12^th.