Canadian Debt – American Collection Agencies and Their Clients Are About to Learn a Hard Lesson

When making business decisions one’s natural tendency is to assess risk and reward through our own experiences and frames of reference.  With the American and Canadian marketplaces being so intertwined, American collection agency owners often forget that Canada is a foreign country and unlike the U.S.; there is no distinction between consumer and commercial debt collection law. It is this “unconscious incompetence” that may expose American commercial collection agencies and their clients to unnecessary risk and investigation.  Canadian commercial agency, Priority Credit Recovery Inc., has developed a web site (www.collectdebtincanada.com) that will assist American collection agency owners and credit grantors to adhere to the Canadian legal system.

The association of North American Consumer Protection Investigators (www.nacpi.org) was formed to “…provide a medium through which the consumer protection investigators, civil and criminal, of the respective governments (federal, state, county, city, province, district, or territory) [can] receive educational training at annual conferences, network, exchange information, and cooperate in matters involving consumer protection investigations, education, and litigations, of mutual concern to all.”

Recently, during an industry association dinner with our Director of Fair Trading, I was informed that Service Alberta will be asking U.S. federal debt collection regulators to investigate complaints from Canadians concerning American collection agencies and vice versa. The problem I see for the American commercial debt collection industry is that most agency owners and their clients are not aware that Canadian consumer protection laws also cover commercial claims.