Excuses for Commercial Late Pays Get a Facelift

Excuses, Excuses — What would you guess to be the most popular excuse businesses give for not paying their bills on time?

According to Les Kirschbaum, president of one of the nation’s largest commercial credit and collection agencies, it’s the same time-honored line that has topped the list for decades: “The check is in the mail.” Kirschbaum reports that in recent years, however, the snail mail dodge has been giving way to the new symbol of technological tardiness: the computer.

Now he’s getting excuses like: “Our computer has broken down.” or “Our computer wiped out Accounts Payable, and we don’t know who we owe money to.” (But whenever there is a printers’ strike, the line most likely to be heard is: “We’ve run out of checks, and won’t be able to get any until the printers go back to work.”)

Some debtors, however, are far more imaginative. He remembers, for example, the Oregon businessman who, after the eruption of Mount St. Helens, claimed: “Volcanic dust has clogged my checkwriting equipment.”

And he vividly recalls one debtor who placed his own obituary in the local paper, and made sure that clippings were sent to all his creditors.

It worked for a while, too, until word got out that the deceased was still around town. But the ones that amuse Kirschbaum the most are the debt-dodgers who can’t remember what they used as excuses the first time around. Or the second. “We had one fellow,” he recalls, “who buried his mother four times in a three-month period.”