Kristal Dailey looks at a court document from Jefferson Capital Systems’ case against her. Photo by Nick Hagen for ProPublica.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
Last November, Kristal Dailey looked at her weekly paycheck and realized about $150 was missing, a quarter of her take-home earnings from a factory just outside Detroit, where she makes just over $18 an hour.
“I’m like, ‘What the heck is this from?’” she said.
Dailey immediately reached out to her company’s human resources department. That’s when embarrassment and then anger replaced her initial shock.
Her check, she learned, was being garnished over a $1,500 debt that was at least five years old. The money was being taken by a collection company she’d never heard of, after a court hearing she hadn’t attended. The garnishment went on for more than eight weeks; no matter how much she worked, 25% of her wages were garnished.
“It was terrible,” she said. “I just had a baby, just got back to work. For them to start taking $150, $160 out was drastic to me.”
The original source of the debt was quite familiar to her: DTE Energy, the Detroit area’s largest utility company.
The company had quietly sold off Dailey’s debt in 2017, along with that of more than 290,000 other residential customers and nearly 14,000 commercial accounts, in a...
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