Often agencies that are not paid by a lawyer give up on collecting the debt. Stenographers often have contracts with agencies as opposed to lawyers directly. This opens up a world where lawyer doesn’t pay agency, agency doesn’t pay reporter, agency writes off the debt. This is a vicious cycle where the stenographer is ultimately saddled with 0 despite it being the stenographer’s time that’s used up. The response? I think we should start looking into writing off debt too. It’s time to start breaking out those 1099s and sending them right along to agencies. Financially it is always better to make a dollar than to write a dollar off, but it is better to write a dollar off than not make a dollar.
And I’m going to come right on out and say the agency that began this post was Veritext. I saw the story of another reporter online, and this was the agency’s grand solution. Mind you, it’s actually a really good solution, but in my opinion, they should not be writing off debt and then not paying the reporter immediately. It’s disgraceful. And I hope in the future should a representative of Veritext come across this site, you’ll either report to us that you’ve changed your policy to pay your reporter in the event of bad debt, or you’re considering altering the policy.
Regardless, it’s time to take a stand on this issue as individuals. The very least we can do is make writing off the bad debt of agencies ubiquitous so that we are not left with zero. In an ideal world, perhaps we would press agencies and collect from them, but the time spent and financial expense of even the smallest lawsuit or claim is too great for many stenographers.
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