Best Places to Work in Collections Winner Faces Uncertainty in Sector

For James H. Clark III, VP of Collection Services at Professional Account Services, Inc. (PASI) — the winner among large companies in the Best Places to Work in Collections 2010 — the natural question of how he plans to repeat the performance in the annual insideARM.com program comes with added uncertainty next year. Clark’s firm focuses on healthcare collections, a sector undergoing fundamental changes.

“We’re just trying to monitor the situation,” he says, of the pending government overhaul planned for the health care industry, a major source of revenue for the Tennessee-based health care services firm established in 1987. “There’s so much uncertainty,” he says. “Will parts of it be repealed? Will parts of it not be funded or [not] make it to the final implementation? We’re actually anticipating [some changes] and keeping an eye on how all the different insurance could change our collection.”

For PASI and the industry at large, Clark obviously doesn’t anticipate going away anytime soon, but particular regulatory reforms might be “hard to predict,” he says. With over twenty years of health care and collection experience that includes 13 years with PASI, 12 years as a hospital CFO before serving as a Medicaid auditor in the Medicaid program previously, Clark’s opinion certainly befits the company’s nearly 400 employees. “With heath care reform there are probably going to be some changes in the future,” he says. “Obviously, a lot of those don’t come into play until 2012.”

Changes and uncertainties are expected for those firms dealing in similar recovery services, including Best Places to Work in Collections 2010 winner for a small sized company, Receivable Recovery Partners (RRP), who also does most of its collection in the medical sector. One could speculate the government overhaul posing unforeseen problems for a company of PASI’s size, but Clark doesn’t think so. “And the reason I say that is that we network and stay in contact with other agencies our size but also smaller, and it seems like we’re all faced with some of the same challenges,” he noted

Those challenges and the subsequent high marks for the second year running in the annual Best Places to Work in Collections poll shows that Clark and PASI are doing what they can with an even larger elephant that hasn’t left the room since last year — the national recession.

“It’s challenging,” he says, “What I mean by that is that we’re in the collection industry, so it’s been tough for our employees to reach their goals and targets. So what we’ve done, as we have in the past, is extend awards programs, appreciations, celebrations, luncheons to celebrate a successful month [for example], because we know it’s been tough for the last year to 18 months.”

For all the immediate remedies and incentives to combat a difficult year, however, Clark admits there are still challenges unique for a large company like PASI that needs his attention and expertise. “I guess some of the difficulties we may have versus others is that we have various service lines so we have different skill sets, different levels of education,” he says, “and trying to make all that work in the same office.”

Despite the ongoing recession and pending health care reform, Clark says PASI has developed a corporate culture over the past three to four years wherein employees simply enjoy coming to work.  “I know it’s a tough job and we try to have fun and keep morale up and I think we’ll just continue,” he says.

Like many of the top agencies operating in the US today, PASI offers a wide range of benefits and employee perks such as flexible schedules, good bonus structures, health and trim programs, open door communication policies, including a “Lunch with Clark” forum, and least of all quarterly departmental surveys similar to those administered by insideARM.com and Best Companies Group each year.

“We do take [the survey] feedback and focus on areas where some people may have marked neutral, either through education or feedback,” he says, noting how serious and helpful such information can be for a company that prides itself on fulfilling its corporate mission through daily activities and basic communication. “So that’s probably what we’ll do next year: take a look at where we were lower than our average and try and bring those [results] up.”

“We were second three years ago and we just didn’t like being second,” Clark says, laughing at the most challenging element of all: a personal challenge. “We worked really hard to get into first, and we’re going to work hard to stay there.”