Office of Financial Management explains that efforts to collect funds will continue, nonetheless
The Sarasota County Commission has approved a resolution that wrote off uncollectible fees adding up to $3,751,988.22 for the county’s Emergency Services, Public Utilities, and Libraries and Historical Resources departments.
The action came on Sept. 10, as the board members unanimously approved their Consent Agenda of routine business matters. None of the commissioners offered comments on the recommendation from the Office of Financial Management (OFM) to take the action.
As explained by a Sept. 10 memo from the OFM staff that was included in the agenda packet, “Each department is responsible for enforcing collections of its own receivables and submitting uncollectible accounts to be written off annually to the Board of County Commissioners. This action, if approved by the Board of County Commissioners, does not relieve debtors of their financial obligation to the County nor does it mean that collection efforts on the part of the departments would cease.”
The amounts written off by the Sept. 10 vote, by department, are as follows:
- Emergency Services’ total — $3,509,188.07. Of that figure, $3,486,673.07 was for the Emergency Medical Services Division, with the remainder — $22,515 — was for the Fire Prevention & Training Division. The write-off in this case represented amounts due for services rendered from Oct. 1, 2021 through Sept. 30, 2022, which was the 2022 fiscal year, a separate document explained.
- Public Utilities’ uncollectible accounts total — $195,524.06. That was for the 2023 fiscal year, the separate document in the Sept. 10 agenda packet noted. Of that total, $195,462.31 represented unpaid customer bills; the rest — $61.75 was for water and sewer installment loans.
The other document — a report from OFM — said, “As with any utility system, a certain amount of revenue will be considered uncollectible” because of non-payment of final billings, bankruptcy, or the death of a customer who left no estate. That document also explained, “Sarasota County Utility Customer Service sets up new sewer and water service connections, which includes financing connection fees at the request of the customer. A portion of this write-off request” involves 30 accounts with amounts ranging from $0.03 to $9.83. “The amounts requested for write-off are due to interest that accrued” because of the timing of the payments and the fact that one loan was set up incorrectly, the document added.
- Libraries and Historical Resources’ total — $47,276.09, all of which represented uncollected fees.
The OFM report in the agenda packet pointed out that the Emergency Services Department bills ambulance service consumers. “When patients have health insurance benefits, Sarasota County Emergency Services accepts payment from insurance as well as Medicare and Medicaid,” the document added. “In some cases, a deductible or co-payment is required directly from the patient after insurance payments and other allowable items have been reconciled. Patients without primary, secondary, or tertiary coverage are billed the entire amount.”
However, the document explained, “These outstanding liabilities may be difficult to collect because the responsible party died without an estate, filed for bankruptcy, could not be located or other reasons.”
Then it noted, “All delinquent accounts are turned over to a third-party collection agency. Collection efforts, including collection letters, repeated phone contacts, and the third-party collection agency reports accounts to credit reporting agencies Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, will continue beyond this write-off.
“Experience has shown that it takes roughly 24-months for accounts to be thoroughly processed,” that report said.
The document also pointed out, “Collection efforts for write-off accounts do not cease. [County] Resolution No. 2023-171 approved $3,396,478.06 to be written off for [the 2021 fiscal year, but] since that time, the third-party billing agency and the collection agency have collected an additional $177,822.43.”
In regard to the library fees, the OFM report said that the period covered for “patron fees for unreturned materials” was the 2022 fiscal year, as well. A chart showed that the number of items that were not returned in the 2021 fiscal year totaled 2,400; for the 2022 fiscal year, the figure was 2,425.