RSI’s approach focuses on quick-hit initiatives, or high return on investment initiatives, to help fund the overall project. By doing so, agencies experience actual benefits early in the project instead of waiting for the final solution to be implemented. Experienced RSI staff work directly with the agency using a proven methodology to determine which aspects of the project will provide a significant early return on investment, as well as determine the criteria in which to measure these benefits.
Collection Case Management Solution
RSI’s Collections Workbench provides a robust set of case management functions tailored specifically to the needs of Tax and Revenue agency collectors and management. The solution provides up-to-the-minute detailed status of all “in-progress” cases based on a set of comprehensive case tracking and review features, all of which are part of an electronic case folder. The case folder contains the complete contents of the case, including all taxpayer history, financials, assets and taxpayer submitted records. From the case, the collector may issue or release a lien or levy, establish a payment plan or transfer specific periods to bankruptcy as part of the bankruptcy management process. All case log entries, contact details, approval history, correspondence, notes and document attachments are maintained in the case folder and can be reviewed online by staff authorized to review the case.
RSI’s Collections Workbench provides several utilities for managing work across the department, including case assignment, workflow, messaging, approval rules, next steps, case closure types, appointment tracking and time recording for field collectors. Collections Workbench supports and enhances the detailed review of taxpayer data by collectors, creating a comprehensive “holistic” view of taxpayer information through seamless integration with an agency’s tax system; eliminating the need to manually re-enter taxpayer demographics, filed return data and other data required for the case. What follows is a breakdown of the specific areas of functionality for RSI’s collections case management solution.
Consolidation of Data
It all starts with the consolidation of internal and external agency data as the foundation of an effective collections system. RSI’s Collections Workbench focuses on integration with the data sources collectors use most by building comprehensive taxpayer “portfolios” and allowing both the users and system to leverage those data sources to drive collections management. This includes a summary view of all case information, financials, contact information, banks, wages, licenses, real property and responsible officer data.
Risk-Based Scoring
Risk-based scoring allows agencies to more effectively prioritize and work their accounts receivable, by assessing the likelihood of taxpayer behavior such as payment on a receivable at the time it enters collections. As new information is added or current information is modified, predictive scores are updated for each account. RSI’s scoring solution incorporates highly sophisticated and proven algorithms, producing optimum prioritization of accounts for assignment to the most appropriate collections treatment strategies. Refer to RSI’s Decision Analytics brochure for detailed information on our decision analytics solutions.
Research and Skip-Tracing
As is the case of any collection operation, taxpayer research and skip-tracing are mission critical components to ensure successful account resolution. These steps also, if done manually, consume a significant portion of collector’s time working a case. RSI’s Collections Workbench identifies and consolidates those data sources necessary for the collector to search for asset information such as bank, wage and property information, as well as license and address information.
Inventory Management
Utilization of workflow technology and data to better perform inventory management allows supervisors to assign cases to certain users or user groups and target specific segments of the inventory (e.g., age, balance, tax type or risk). With data-driven prioritization of cases, based on policy and procedure, management can ensure that the right collection action is being taken on the right taxpayer at the right time. Inventories are prioritized based on agency business rules and collectors have the ability to sort and filter their inventories, or have the system determine the “next best case” to work. Strategies may also be driven by agency objectives such as the implementation of special enforcement projects to generate additional revenue. In addition, system alerts can be sent to staff based on activity that has occurred on taxpayers assigned to them. Examples might include: taxpayer change in address, a new receivable has entered collections or new asset information exists for the taxpayer.
Noticing and Billing
Incorporated into the automated case flows are notice and billing functionality. While maintaining the ability to manually generate notices, implementing automated noticing and billing functionality allows for collection through configurable agency workflow rules and account criteria, postponing user intervention until absolutely necessary.
Responsible Person and Taxpayer Relationship Management
For the collection of business taxes, the ability to identify and manage taxpayer relationships is an essential part of effectively resolving that tax liability. Businesses may be unable to pay their tax liability, however there will always be responsible person(s) for the taxes owed on that business. For personal income taxes, it can be difficult to determine which spouse was responsible for which tax liabilities. Identifying those persons, the liabilities in which they are responsible for and tracking individual payments against those liabilities ensures that the proper collection activity is being performed against each taxpayer. RSI’s Collections Workbench manages taxpayer relationships at the detailed level so that all liabilities may be included as part of enforced collection activities.
Enforcement Functionality
Through data interfaces and data aggregation methods, RSI’s Collections Workbench facilitates enforcement activity through searches, both automated and manual, to identify attachable assets. Once the asset identification process is complete, liens and levies can be manually or automatically generated. For liens, the system allows for issuance, release, management and reporting of all liens to the appropriate external agencies.
In addition, Collections Workbench manages the bankruptcy process through interfaces to and from state courts, where available. Bankruptcy cases are automatically created and the appropriate correspondence, such as Proof of Claims, are generated and submitted. Periodic updates back from the court are processed to verify bankruptcy status. These automated functions free up agency staff to focus on revenue generating initiatives.
Outside Collection Agency Management
Through RSI’s outside collection agency management functionality, agencies can more effectively manage their outsourced accounts receivable. This functionality incorporates business rules for automatically placing delinquent accounts with the appropriate outside collection agency. The business rules employ metrics to allow for extensive reporting and tracking, allowing for up to date analysis of vendor productivity on those outsourced accounts.
System Administrator
No longer do configuration changes such as the timing of next case actions, adding correspondence templates, changing user security or the implementation of special inventory initiatives to name a few, require significant IT programming efforts. The agency’s management team can simply use the Collections Workbench’s system administrator facility to configure business rules and content.
Payment Agreement Monitoring
Payment agreement monitoring is a time consuming activity for collectors if not automated. Often times, a taxpayer may be paying less than the agreed to terms, making every other payment or have new debt that has not been consolidated with the existing case. RSI’s enhanced approach to monitoring automatically recognizes defaults, or potential defaults, based on agency defined business rules and applies the appropriate case treatment. This may entail, automatically or manually, placing an account back into the case flow for review, generating a notice to the taxpayer or simply notifying the collector that new debt has been added for this taxpayer.
Consulting Services
Revenue Generation Studies & Business Process Improvements
Many organizations are looking for opportunities to improve upon their collections process without replacing their current collections system. RSI provides professional consulting services that range from short duration Revenue Generation Studies to more in depth Business Process Improvement or Re-engineering projects. Each initiative involves an assessment of the organization’s current state, identification of opportunities for gaining additional collections lift and a proposed plan for implementing those improvements.
There are several critical steps for evaluating a process and identifying improvements. For each major function, through a partnership with agency staff, RSI begins to identify how the process could be re-engineered, what technology or data may be needed to enable the re-engineered process, the changes required in organization/personnel to affect the new process and any impact or changes to infrastructure required. Research of enabling technologies, as well as associated options and costs, are taken into consideration in order to effectively estimate the potential return on investment for each recommendation. In the final analysis, a “Could Be” state is presented including recommendations, estimated efforts/costs and associated barriers or issues, including organizational change adoption.
A partial list of the recommendations, which RSI has implemented through successful partnerships with Tax and Revenue agencies, include:
- Collections Risk-Based Strategy Rules and Implementation of New Collections Treatment Strategies;
- Consolidation of Collections Research for Asset Identification and Skip-tracing;
- Collector Inventory Alerts for new Assets or Demographic Information;
- Identification and Management of Responsible Officer Offsets;
- Lien Management Solutions for Issuance and Release with County Registry of Deeds;
- Improved Analysis and Understanding of Accounts Receivable Reporting;
- Collections Executive Dashboard Analysis and Reporting;
- Inventory Re-prioritization and Monitoring; and,
- Automated Identification of Asset, Bank and Wage Levy Sources.
Summary
RSI’s Accounts Receivable Management practice line is devoted to working with Tax and Revenue agencies to address the complexities of accounts receivable administration and provide these agencies measurable efficiency gains through the intelligent use of data, enhanced case tracking, data-driven inventory management and performance measurement management reporting. RSI’s Accounts Receivable Management practice provides agencies, collectors and supervisors with a powerful case management solution and consulting services designed to increase productivity by providing collectors with the information they need to more effectively identify taxpayer information and collect outstanding accounts receivable.
Contact an RSI representative today at (888) 826-1541 to see how RSI’s Accounts Receivable Management products and services can help your agency.
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