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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowFishers-based medical debt collection agency Phoenix Financial Services LLC has closed, putting 94 people out of work at a business that only a few years ago was among central Indiana’s fastest-growing companies.
According to a layoff notice the company sent to the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, most of the layoffs happened Dec. 31. The notification had Friday’s date on it, and the DWD posted the information to its website on Monday.
IBJ was unable to reach Phoenix for details about the closure. The company’s phone number was out of service Tuesday morning and its website consists only of a blank page with the message, “This content is no longer available.”
The contact person listed on the layoff notice did not return a phone message and email seeking comment Tuesday morning.
The closure comes less than two years after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Phoenix to pay a $1.68 million penalty, plus refunds to affected customers, over violations of federal debt-collection and credit-reporting laws.
In a June 2023 consent order, the CFPB alleged that, “in at least thousands of instances,” Phoenix sent debt collection letters to consumers who had disputed the validity or accuracy of the debt without sufficiently investigating whether the consumers actually owed the debt. Those actions violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the CFPB alleges.
The CFPB also alleged that Phoenix furnished information about the disputed debts to credit agencies such as Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. That was a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the CFPB said.
In addition to the $1.68 million penalty, the CFPB also ordered Phoenix to refund any amounts that consumers had paid to the debt collector after receiving a collection letter for an unverified debt since January 2017.
In both 2018 and 2019, Phoenix was included in IBJ’s Fast 25 list of the fastest-growing privately held Indianapolis-area companies. Phoenix made the 2019 list by achieving 114% revenue growth between 2016 and 2018, with $21.6 million in 2018 revenue.
Phoenix CEO David Hoeft told IBJ in 2019 that the company’s goal at the time was to branch into government and state contracts, including tax collections, and to double its business in the next two years.
The layoff notice said 87 employees were terminated on Dec. 31 and one person was let go on Jan. 10. The company said the employees included accountants and auditors, computer-operations personnel, customer service and sales representatives, and operations, marketing and human resources managers.
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And nothing of value was lost.
So long, suckers.