Monitoring creditor practices

Debt advisers should keep a record of the collection techniques and tactics used by individual creditors. This is useful in any future choice of strategy. In addition, note practices or situations that continually cause hardship to clients and monitor which creditors are responsible.

The effectiveness of any pressure for change often depends on the ability of an agency to produce evidence in support of its recommendations. For this reason, case recording must be accurate and detailed, stored in a form that allows details of particular practices, and the hardship they cause, to be retrieved and patterns detected.

There are frequent changes in the law and procedures that affect debt, and agencies are often in a very good position to look closely at how these are working in practice. Agencies often carry out such exercises as part of a network of local and national debt services.