Debt Collection Officer

Job description

Full Time / 37 Hours Per Week / Permanent

The Income Collection team is part of the Business Service Centre, our primary goal is to maximise the collection of debt outstanding to the council across a range of services.

An exciting opportunity has arisen to work in a new specialist team within our Income Collection Service. You will play a pivotal role in the collection and recovery of Adult Social Care debt and benefit overpayments, helping to maximise income collection while delivering a fair, customer-focused service and ensuring that debts are paid in a timely fashion. This is an important role in ensuring that the council's income is maintained, and the amount of debt owed to the council is minimised and reduced.

This is a full time, permanent, post working 37 hours per week Monday to Friday. You'll be based at Town Hall.

What you'll be doing

As a Debt Collection Officer, you'll manage a portfolio of cases, taking actions to pursue payment including communications to and from debtors via the telephone, email and letters, establishing an ability to pay and arranging repayments whilst a professional standard of customer service is maintained. You'll assess income & expenditure information along with supporting documentation, assessing debtors' likelihood and ability to pay, whilst also obtaining details for possible further enforcement options.

You'll deal with external debt enquiries and various forms of correspondence. For example, missing payments, reconciliations, remittances & sensitive case queries i.e., financial hardship, social care, and deceased cases including contact with external bodies such as solicitors, debt advice agencies, insolvency agents & bailiffs.

In addition, you'll manage internal enquiries and responses between departments issuing invoices and the debtors being invoiced, when queries, disputes and complaints are received, to ensure timely responses, whilst monitoring and reviewing payment arrangements.

What you'll need

You will be able to communicate effectively to deal with customer enquiries and have significant experience working in a customer-focused environment, including face-to-face, telephone and written communication and have experience in working in a finance environment with any forms of credit control, debt enforcement or account receivable experience being particularly desirable.

You'll also need experience in using a range of IT applications and systems, including substantial experience of computerised finance packages, spreadsheets, e-mails, telephony, web & database applications with practical experience essential in MS Excel & Word.

What we can offer you

As well as the satisfaction of helping to improve thousands of lives across Leicester, you can look forward to a work environment that encourages a healthy work/life balance. You'll enjoy generous annual leave, membership of the Local Government Pension Scheme and the option of flexible working. We'll also give you the chance to develop your skills and expertise with a variety of training and development opportunities. In addition, you can choose from a number of flexible benefits, including discounts on city buses and trains. For an illustrative value of your benefits package, take a look at our benefits calculator.

Join us

We're committed to recruiting a diverse and highly talented workforce as we continue to build a council that is fitting and representative of our great city. That's why we've designed our recruitment process to put you at your ease, make you feel welcome and bring the best out of you. We'll do all we can to make our recruitment process as fair as possible. To help you with your application, take a look at the 'our approach to recruitment' page.

For an informal discussion about this post, please contact: Emma Hartley at [email protected]

Interviews / Assessments will take place on week commencing 14th of September