Would you hire a known thief?"

Let us suppose that someone came to your business and asked you for a job and before you hired him you found out that he is a habitual thief. Would you hire him in a position that required him to handle your money on a constant and recurring basis??? Well, to most business people that would be an easy question to answer. It wouldn't even take a second thought. Yet if you have a business off or on the internet that has accounts receiveable and you turn them over to a debt collector you are doing just that. Hiring a thief to collect your money for you. l

Now that may seem like a wild-eyed accusation to you but let me explain to you why that is true and then hopefully you willl see the logic behind it. Let us take your own business (if you have one) and you have some employees. And it is almost a fact that if you have employees sooner or later one of them will run into financial problems and get turned over to a 3rd party debt collector by their creditors. First thing you know, one of your employees gets called to the phone to answer a call from a debt collector. If that happens, then you may start to think and realize that you put in your telephones at a high price for the convenience of your custormers and to make it much more efficient to run your business. You want people to call you and that is why you have a telephone system, possibly paying high advertising bills for Yellow Page ads or whatever. And then you wake up and find out that instead of your phone being available to customers and making you money it is being tied up by incessant calls from bill collectors who are not only stealing your telephone services in the furtherance of their business and you get beat out of your phone service in the meantime.

And what if you have a secretary to answer those phones??? Now they are not only stealing your telephone services but the time for which you must pay the person who is answering your phones and you sure didn't want to pay the secretary to answer tons of phone calls from bill collectors. And then you have to pay the wages for the time that the employee spends talking to them.

Pretty high price to pay for thievery, isnt it???? And they are guilty of theft of services in reality, are they not???

And so you get all bent out of shape about that and you lay down the law and a rule that employees may not use your company phones for any purpose except family emergencies. Now that makes you look like a big bad Scrooge in the eyes of your employess although they surely aren't going to tell you that.is how they really feel.
If they did that you would probably tell them that that is the company policy and if they don't like it they can bloody well go find a job somewhere else.

OK, so you cured your problem by forbidding your employees to receive anything but emergency phone calls. Now then, do you really want to hire a thieving debt collector and turn him loose on other merchants???
Have you thought about the ethical considerations here?? Probably not because what you are interested in is colllection what is owed to you by your customers and you haven't thought about what you are doing to others in the process.

All I can say is that if you are a Christian then maybe you ought to stop and think about what Jesus had to say. DO UNTO OTHERS AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM DO UNTO YOU.

Am I being outrageous or outlandish in what I say??? Maybe so, but one thing I can tell you is that I know some employers who have employees getting dinged to death and they put a stop to it by first of all sending those debt collectors a Cease & Desist letter which they have every right to do under the law and then when the calls kept on coming in anyway they called up the sheriff and filed criminal theft of services charges against the thieves and had them extradited and thrown in jail to face criminal theft of services charges.

But before you turn a bunch of thieves loose on your fellow merchants again stop to think about what you are doing.