It is no secret that the vast majority of judgments entered by U.S. courts forever remain uncollected. It’s not that collection is impossible. Rather, it is a matter of judgment creditors not knowing the best ways to go about collecting. Many do not understand the value of debtor assets and how to actually uncover those assets.
We say ‘uncovering’ for the simple fact that more than one judgment debtor has attempted to hide assets from creditors, their attorneys, and judgment collection agencies. Hiding assets is a strategy designed specifically to thwart any attempts to seize such assets as payment for an outstanding judgment.
Uncovering Assets Is a Skill
Judgment collection agencies rely on a number of different tools to do what they do. Skip tracing is one such tool. It is a strategy of finding debtors who have decided to skip town to avoid paying. In addition, agencies also work on uncovering hidden assets.
Finding assets that debtors are trying to hide isn’t a happy accident. In fact, the skill to uncover assets requires knowledge, time, and experience to develop. The more skilled a collection agency and its staff are, the more successful they tend to be at collection.
A Case from Our Own Files
Here at Judgment Collectors, we take considerable pride in the skill our team members demonstrate day in and day out. We have plenty of cases from our own files proving that our team can get the job done. In one particular case, we were working on collecting from a debtor who had been trying to avoid payment for some time.
Though we cannot give away the details of how we did it (we don’t want debtors to know our secrets) we were able to uncover a piece of property the debtor owned in a county different from where he lived. The property was actually a plane hangar worth quite a bit.
As long as that property remained hidden, the debtor could claim insufficient resources to pay. But any such claims instantly disappeared once we made it clear that we knew about the hangar. Not long after that, the debt was taken care of.
People Don’t Want to Lose Their Assets
The truth of the matter is that people do not want to lose their assets. That’s why they try to hide them. We don’t know what types of judgments you’re still trying to collect but try to put yourself in a debtor’s shoes. Imagine you own a valuable piece of property you do not want to lose to an outstanding judgment.
If your attorney advises you about how to hide that property from us, wouldn’t you make every effort to do so? Most people would. But what most people do not understand is that judgment collection agencies know how to locate assets debtors are purposely trying to hide.
So many creditors fail to collect because they don’t know enough to look for hidden assets. And even among the small number who do know, they still don’t know how or where to look. They do not know about the many asset discovery tools they have at their disposal.
We Love Looking for Assets
Asset discovery is part of the process here at Judgment Collectors. To be as blunt as possible, we love to uncover assets. We count it a victory whenever we can uncover an asset a debtor is trying to hide from us.
Hidden assets could be key to your successful collection. If you are struggling to get paid from a debtor making every effort to skip out, contact us. Let us talk about how we might be able to change that.