Working at a facility who took you to collections?

[FutureDNP2021, ASN, RN]

What is the standard practice of hiring/firing employees who may owe the facility money?

Say, if a new hire's wages start being garnished to pay their old debt, which originated from the very facility who is issuing the salary. Does this get flagged by HR?

Is it unethical, even if the employee is working there and is attempting to pay towards the old medical collection debt?

Is it legal to fire in this circumstance d/t conflict of interest or the like?

What if the medical debts were acquired from another facility? Is this still frowned upon for staff workers in the medical field to own unpaid medical bills, especially?

Ive just heard credit checks are a trend with employers, and with ACA nearing extinction I predict more medical debt heading for collections. These issues may or may not intersect, but I am curious to find out.

Thank you for sharing your take on this particular topic! :)

[HouTx, BSN, MSN, EdD]

Those are a lot of questions. Years ago, my organization did a major systems upgrade to their patient financial software. Of course, it did not go as well as planned... do they ever? The process for patient billing was riddled with problems that caused significant delays in billing. BUT (wait for it . . ) the system that tracked "past due" bills and moved them into collections was super-charged. So - you guessed it - many people (including employees) received collection notices before they had actually received a bill.

Of course, employees tried to resolve the issues and many of them attempted to arrange payment via payroll deductions only to discover that there were no communications pathways at all between payroll & "business" systems. It all had to be managed through laborious manual processes.

So - if your organization is like mine when it comes to financials... the right hand doesn't even know that there is a left hand. It's unlikely that there is any information exchanged between HR/employment and Finance/Accounting. BTW, credit checks are normally only for jobs that are involved in financial transactions - not patient care staff.

[caliotter3]

BTW, credit checks are normally only for jobs that are involved in financial transactions - not patient care staff.

Was told by an employer that did credit checks that the information was evaluated on an individual basis and not the sole reason for not hiring. Also have read more than once that credit checks are primarily used to detect consistency in the info provided, i.e. are listed addresses consistent with each other or are there discrepancies?