State tax officials plan to hire a private collection agency to chase down tax delinquents, with a special focus on mainland accounts involving relatively long-term tax debtors who owe larger amounts.

State Tax Director Maria Zielinski said her department has been reviewing and making revisions on a draft request for proposals, and tentatively aims to put out a formal solicitation by the end of September.

"We want to be aggressive with this, and we realize there are a lot of old amounts out there," she said. "Quite frankly, we’re so short-handed in collection that it’s a matter of resources, of course."

The contract will be structured so that the collection agency receives a share of any amount it manages to collect, she said. The collection agency contract would supplement the efforts of about three dozen state employees in the tax department’s collections section.

This won’t be the first time the state has turned to a private collection agency, a tactic used in many other states.

Years ago the Department of Taxation used private collectors to pursue smaller accounts, while collectors employed by the state focused on the larger accounts.

That approach was judged by the department to be relatively ineffective, Zielinski said, possibly because the collection agency had little incentive to invest time and resources in chasing down debtors who owed relatively small amounts to the state.

Another problem was that the private collectors required far more assistance and interaction with state employees than had been anticipated to gather information related to the accounts, Zielinski said. That meant that state employees were required to invest more time and effort than expected in working with the collection agency.

The tax department recently circulated a new draft request for proposals to incorporate staff suggestions into the new collection agency effort, and "we need to at least try it," Zielinski said. "The beauty of it is it’s all on contingency, so if it doesn’t work, there’s no out-of-pocket (cost) to the state."

"We don’t know ultimately how successful it will be, but if we don’t try we’ll never know," she said.

Zielinski had no estimate available regarding how much additional revenue might be generated by the private collection effort. A spokeswoman for the tax department said there was also no estimate available Monday on how much the department is owed in unpaid taxes, or how many accounts are delinquent.