Consumer Affairs reports this week on debt collection high jinks.  Following up on a complaint from a harassed consumer, the West Virginia Attorney General sued Pinnacle Credit Services for attempting to collect debts without a license.  As part of the settlement reached, Pinnacle cancelled more than $1 million worth of debt that it was trying to collect in West Virginia.  This disappearing debt looks mighty suspicious, especially in light of the fact that the complaining consumer had provided proof to a previous debt collector that the DEBT WAS NOT HERS.

The West Virginia Attorney General warned that: "Old debts are regularly shuffled from the original creditor to multiple collection agencies or sold to debt purchasers. Information regarding these debts is transmitted electronically and may be inaccurate. Moreover, the collection agency or debt purchaser may have added unlawful additional fees to the original debt."

It's time for Congress to tame the wild and wooly world of debt collection.  The difficulty consumers face in determining the legitimacy of a debt must be remedied. 

Possible solutions include: requiring the use of tracking numbers that follow a debt regardless of who holds it; requiring collection agencies to provide consumers with a standardized history of the debt so that consumers can identify that debt as say, the one from the auto mechanic, that was previously held by debt collector A, then by debt collector B and is now held by debt collector C.

It is totally unacceptable to force Americans to constantly guard against questionable and outright fraudulent debt collection.  We have better things to do and more important things to worry about.