Attachments
It is vital that each court develop, and incorporate into every court order, boilerplate describing the courts collections procedures. This will clearly admonish each litigant in advance, indicating:
what is expected of them
what will be considered delinquency
the consequences of such delinquency
The JIMAS Collections tools are fairly flexible, allowing each court to customize its own collections process. But they can't accommodate every approach the court might think up. With that in mind, here are some issues to consider as your court develops its procedure.
AOIC input, as GAL understands it#
The AO doesn't believe that cases should be referred to a collection agency until:
The litigant has been offered the chance to appear in court
A judge has explicitly ordered the case to go to collections under a signed order, even if it's a multi-case order as is often used to set ex parte judgments.
Consider requiring an application in order to get a payment plan#
Someone once suggested that the longer your application form for payment of fines and costs is, the greater the chance that someone will suddenly remember some stash of money they can use to pay their fees immediately. See attached, a nice, LONG application. Among other things, it asks, in great detail, for information about all of the defendant’s assets and obligations.
Define the steps in your process#
What is the nature of the first delinquency hearing?
Is it just a something to let you issue a "courtesy reminder" notice, or
will litigants be offered the option to appear and explain their situation?
Will there be a second delinquency hearing?
If the first step was a courtesy notice, the AO would certainly want the second step to be an actual hearing, so that the litigant can seek relief.
What is the final step?
Issue a warrant?
Refer the case to a collection agency?
Timing issues regarding payment orders#
Make all payments due on the same day of the week- this will make the process easier because it means that you only have to go through the delinquency process/cycle one day a week. If your payments are due on different weekdays, you will have to go through the process of mailing out delinquency letters every day of the week.
Consider carefully which day of the week to require payments- if payments are always due on Tuesdays, it means that each Wednesday you could process the Notices of Delinquency and mail them out immediately. That notice can give them until the following Tuesday to make their payment. You mail it on Wednesday, they get it Thursday or Friday, and they have 4 or 5 days to get a payment to you. Whereas, if your payment due dates are on Fridays, you can’t send out the delinquency notices until the following Monday. They get the notice on Tuesday or Wednesday and must pay by Friday—that’s only two or three days and maybe even less depending on the mail system.
A drop-off box is also a good idea- in smaller counties, you may even be able to make an arrangement with your local bank to allow them to drop envelopes for the Circuit Clerk in their night-deposit box.
Tuesdays are highly recommended for another reason. There are a lot of holidays that fall on a Monday or Friday. When you set your recurring payment due date settings, each of those holidays would cause an error and that particular setting would have to be changed to a different date. Tuesday holidays are much more rare.
Make sure you're clear about HOW MUCH is delinquent#
If you DON'T use a collection agency- delinquency can be based on default on an installment or the outstanding balance- Notice Generation can support either
If you plan to use a collection agency, your payment plan boilerplate must make it clear that if they get behind on installments, then the entire outstanding balance will be considered in default. While 730 ILCS 5/5‑9‑3 (e) allows referral to collections for a default on an installment, JIMS can only refer the entire balance to collections, not missed installments.
Understand WHEN a case is considered delinquent by JIMS#
Remember that a delinquency docket in JIMS is made up of cases which are at that time delinquent against their payment plan by any amount. So if you run a type 160 delinquency docket for 12 weeks ago, you are getting cases which were delinquent 12 weeks earlier (possibly only by $1) and are still delinquent (possibly still by the same $1). It's not a matter of being "12 weeks behind", but rather its a matter of being "behind for 12 weeks".
What about post-termination on cases previously referred to collections?#
It may well be that the court should manually withdraw the case from collections during such post-termination proceedings. But the court's payment order boilerplate should also call for the case to remain withdrawn even after re-sentencing. This is because JIMS has only one account per case- so in order to allow the defendant time to pay on any new amounts from the re-sentencing, the entire case has to remain withdrawn from collections.
Should you allow a grace period?#
A grace period is how long you let a case be behind/delinquent before you take the next enforcement action. In JIMS, this becomes the amount of time you wait before running a delinquency docket for a particular payment due date or delinquency setting (12 weeks in the above example).
If the first step in your process is just a courtesy notice to delinquent litigants, you can run your type 159 docket with little or no grace period. The worst thing that happens is you spend postage on a notice which "crosses in the mail" with the payment.
If the first step in your process is to set an actual hearing, you might want to allow a grace period before running your 159 dockets. That way you can avoid clogging your courtroom with people who just say, "The check is in the mail".
If there is no second hearing, but cases go right to the final enforcement action (collections, warrant, etc.), then you may want to allow a grace period before running your 160 docket. Getting arrested or sent to collections because of a delinquency caused by being $1 behind is one thing, but doing so immediately after your "last chance" delinquency setting may be quite another.
See Printing delinquency notices for some samples
The Illinois Supreme Court's "Electronic Access Policy" says:
A request for bulk dissemination is defined as a request for all, or a significant subset, of the information in court records that is maintained in electronic form, as is and without modification or compilation. Dissemination of bulk information in electronic form is not permitted for court records, except where explicitly provided by court rule, court order, or law.
The Collections Web Service may well be considered to be sending a "significant subset" of the court's data, especially when sending the "backlog" of overdue accounts. So it seems prudent to put in place an administrative rule or order which officially "blesses" the Web Service Definition (Schedule 3), so that your judge has a clear understanding of what is being provided and when.