One of the many recruitment debts we collected this week was from a large IT company who’s chief purchasing officer seemed to have a deranged understanding of contract law.

The CPO claimed that, since our client was not on the PSL that he had recently established, no contract was in place. This was despite the fact that the hiring manager of the IT company had approached the recruiter, and had confirmed receipt of their tob’s.

The debtor tried all sorts of intimidation techniques, threatening to hit our client with massive costs from their top law firm should the case go to court. They also stated our client had breached GDPR regulation by passing the debt to Sterling, and threatened to report them.

It’s often a case of ‘a little knowledge can be dangerous’ when dealing with big corporates. Of course, GDPR regulation allows for businesses to share data with third parties if it is necessary to achieve payment of an invoice. Any business is permitted to engage a debt collection agency and provide them with all evidence necessary to collect if they have not been paid. Also the debt was less than £10k so would fall into small claims where it’s extremely rare to have costs awarded, and it certainly wouldn’t have applied in this case.

All of that is irrelevant however, the fact was our client had done everything by the book, terms had been sent with receipt confirmed by the hiring manager, CV’s had been sent, the candidate had been interviewed. The real reason the debtor did not want to pay is that they hired the candidate for an alternative position at a later date, and had no doubt forgotten their liability to the recruiter.

Once our client engaged Sterling, we made contact with the chief purchasing officer. After some to-ing and fro-ing, with the CPO throwing all sorts of nonsense arguments at us we were finally able to respond to and negate all of his disputes, and convince him that there was no way he was going to get away without paying. The end result was that our client’s invoice was settled in full, along with late payment fees, interest and reasonable costs. This meant that the debtor covered the cost of Sterling’s service with our client effectively using us for free.