Badeen v. Par, Inc

As long as there have been debts, there have been people tasked with collecting them. To regulate the collection industry in Michigan, the Legislature passed a licensing requirement in 1980. This statutory package required collection agencies to obtain licenses and included statutes governing licensees’ permissible actions throughout the collection process.

For many years, the collection industry involved two players: the creditors and the collection agents that they hired to collect debts. But in the late 1990s, as the collection industry evolved, a middleman emerged. These middlemen — known…