Now this is scary!  If you haven't read my previous post, take a minute to scroll down and read it, so you know the background of this.

I found the following in PRA's 2006 SEC Filing :

"Our July 29, 2005 acquisition of the RDS business from Alatax, Inc. further broadened the services we can offer to debt owners and local governments."
.....
"RDS collects delinquent taxes and earns a contingent fee. This fee can vary based on the age of the debt being collected. RDS also processes tax payments for taxing authorities. For this work, they are paid a per transaction fee. RDS also performs tax audit services, for which they are paid at an hourly rate. RDS provides local, state and federal governments a range of revenue enhancement services including revenue administration, revenue discovery and recovery, aged receivables management and compliance auditing."

So, they bought up a company that the government outsources to for tax auditing and collection... then they start sending out 1099s to a large portion of their portfolio that they can't collect from, potentially causing those people a tax nightmare.  Any bets as to whether RDS might reap the benefit of this....Enron, here we go again....

Well, the junk debt buyers are at it again - they've dug up a charge-off from a bank back in 1990, which I actually paid in full with interest back in 1998 so that I could open a new account with the same bank.  Looking into this particular company, I find they are doing some real nasty things:

Ripoff Reports - Portfolio Recovery Associates

Among other things, they are filing 1099-C forms with the IRS reporting debts as forgiven, effectively claiming them as income you are liable for.  They have also been known to re-age accounts, and I found one unauthorized credit check a couple of months ago that was from them, before I knew what they were about.

One of the people who wrote a report at the site above asked an interesting question: "Why would a company file an IRS form as a 'bluff'?"  Actually, I think I see a rather devilish pattern here, given some data points gathered about them on the web:

1. According to their own web site (http://www.portfoliorecovery.com/about.asp), they have acquired over $24 billion in debt portfolios.
   
2. Looking through their SEC filing for last year, these have been purchased for an average of $0.02 on the dollar.
3. For the purpose of accounting assets in their SEC filings, they value the portfolios they buy as assets based on the potential amount they can collect, not the actual purchase price.
4. They are amortizing their portfolio over three years, i.e. the value of portfolios drop each year after purchase until they are valued at $0 at three years.

It seems to me that they have quite the ability to play the numbers as they wish, in terms that best benefit their stock prices and their tax liability.  They purchase debts at pennies on the dollar, call them an asset worth many times that, then deduct the entire inflated value from their taxes over the next three years.  The sudden flurry of 1099s to a large number of debtors (which seems to have just popped up in the last couple of months, or at least greatly increased) makes me wonder if they are trying to write off some portion of their portfolio's projected value before the end of the tax year, to dodge a big tax hit.... meanwhile, a lot of us may be hit with a bill from the IRS....

Today the Drudge Report has this link:
PAPER: World's smallest gun that fires deadly 300mph bullets?

Cute little gun, made by a Swiss company - for 6300 Francs (around $6000 US) you can get the world's smallest revolver, 5.5cm long (just over 2 inches), firing the worlds smallest rimfire ammunition (2.34mm, or 0.092126 caliber) at 10 Francs per round.

But it's illegal in the United States, because it doesn't meet minimum barrel length requirements.  And the hyperbole in the article is pretty incredible.  First it starts out describing this as a lethal weapon:

"The general threshold for perforating the skin is about 330 feet a second.  Apart from bone, skin offers the greatest resistance to penetration. If it can pass through the skin it is potentially lethal, even if the bullets are small.  If you shoved something 3mm across into someone's chest you could kill them. It's the same with these bullets, they could penetrate the heart." As the manufacturer points out, though, the energy produced is less than one tenth that of an air rifle:
http://www.swissminigun.com/ammunition.html

In fact, looking at the weight of the projectile in question (0.12 grams), it has no more mass than a soft-air BB, which generally range from 0.12 to 0.2 grams.  I've personally been hit by more than my share of those, at velocities up to 400 fps, and have only had a couple of occasions where any blood was drawn.  The cross section with these bullets is smaller, but if someone shot me with this little revolver, I think I would be inclined to ask them to stop it...

But they go way further with this:

"Jonathan Spencer, consultant forensic scientist and firearms expert, said that although the gun, which fires bullets at a speed of 399 feet a second, was tiny, it could still prove fatal and in the eyes of the law was as dangerous as a machine gun."
"It is capable of killing someone. Under section 5 of the Firearms Act it would be a prohibited weapon. It would be on the same scale as a machine gun."

For some reason, I have trouble fathoming this comparison:

	Machine Gun	Swiss Mini Gun
Capacity	30+ rounds	6 rounds
Ammunition	High power military rounds	Somewhere between SoftAir and BB gun?
Fire Rate	600-1500 rounds per minute	Somewhere around 2 seconds per round?
Targeting	Tactical sites, laser sites, scope, etc	Peer over miniature sites set about 1.4" apart

Strangely, when you look at the company's website about export restrictions, you find that Canada's strict gun laws allow import, considering it to be "not deemed a firearm".  Yet here in the U.S., where a wide range of firearms are readily available, we go on high alert over this:

"In September 2006 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(ATF) in New York issued a warning about the gun after being alerted by a police officer who spotted it on a website.  Special Agent William McMahon said the gun was so small it could pass for a key fob, and warned it made the perfect stealth weapon for serious criminals." Ummm, ya, a seriously retarded criminal, in my opinion - one that would be willing to spend around $6,000 (more, on black market, I'm sure) for a gun that could only possibly have any effect at point blank range, and even then might do little or no harm.... it would seem to me that a simple shank would have far more predictable results.

I think someone has been watching too many James Bond movies.....