By the TSI Team
The best time to test a collections program is the 3 to 6 months before you write the solicitation. Pull your own referral and remittance data, compare it to the contract’s terms, listen to calls with residents, and ask every firm, incumbent included, for evidence you can verify yourself. Then write the RFP around what you found.
Once a solicitation is out, the procurement rules limit who you can talk to. Before it’s out, you can ask anyone anything. Most finance teams spend that window drafting scope language. Spend some of it gathering evidence.
Start with your own records
You already hold most of what you need. Pull 12 months of referrals and remittances by program: parking, tax, utility, court fees, overpayments, whatever you place.
For each program, answer four questions:
- What share of referred balances has been resolved, and how long did it take?
- How much reached the treasury net of fees, and does the math match the contract rate?
- How many remittance exceptions came up, and how fast did each clear?
- How many resident complaints reached your office, a council member or the attorney general, and what were they about?
If you can’t answer one of these from your own records, that’s a finding too. It tells you what the next contract needs to require in reporting.
Listen to the calls
Ask the incumbent for a random sample of recorded calls with residents from the last quarter. 20 is enough to learn something. Include hardship calls and disputes, since those are the calls a constituent remembers and a council member hears about.
Listen for three things: whether the resident gets accurate information about the balance, whether hardship options are offered when the resident describes a hardship, and whether the call ends with a clear next step. You’re checking whether the firm speaks for your government the way you’d want it to.
Ask for evidence you can check yourself
Every firm will describe its compliance program. Ask for the documents behind the description, and prefer the ones you can verify without calling the firm.
| Ask for | How you check it |
|---|---|
| A licence schedule, state by state, with licence numbers | State licensing registries |
| Federal contract history | USAspending.gov |
| Any bid protest decisions involving the firm | gao.gov |
| The complaint log for your accounts, with dispositions | Your own complaint records |
| Information security evidence, with scope and audit period | Read the scope page, then ask what it excludes |
| Accessibility conformance for letters and web pages residents use | Section 508 or WCAG documentation |
| Where the work happens, including any subcontractors | Site list, written into the contract |
A firm that sends a schedule is easier to evaluate than a firm that sends a sentence. That’s true of the incumbent as well.
Test a slice of the collections program before you rebid
If your contract or a cooperative vehicle allows a second firm, place a defined slice of new referrals with it for 90 days. Match the slice to the incumbent’s on balance size, age and program. Agree the reporting definitions in writing before the first file moves.
At the end of 90 days you’ll have something most RFP evaluation committees don’t: side-by-side results on your own residents’ accounts, measured the same way. That evidence can shape your scope, your evaluation criteria and your pricing structure.
Write the collections program RFP around what you learned
The test tells you what to require. If exceptions took weeks to clear, write a reconciliation timeline into the scope. If hardship calls went badly, require a hardship pathway and ask each bidder to describe it. If your own records couldn’t answer the four questions, require monthly reporting that can.
It also tells you what to weigh. A procurement analyst can verify a licence schedule, a federal contract record and a GAO decision in an afternoon. Evaluation criteria built on checkable evidence are easier to score and easier to defend if a losing bidder protests.
What we’ll send you
TSI is one of five firms on the US Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service private collection agency panel, holds active contracts with Treasury and HHS, held Department of Education prime contracts from 1998 to 2017, and is licensed or registered in every state that requires it and authorized to collect in all 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico. We’d rather you check those facts than take our word for them.
So we put them in one credential packet:
- the Fiscal Service panel listing
- our federal award records on USAspending.gov
- GAO decision B-414090, a February 2018 bid protest TSI won on a Treasury procurement
- our licence schedule, as a schedule, state by state
Use it as a benchmark for what to ask every firm, including us. If it helps, we’ll brief your program office afterward.