The calls would come at all hours of the day, sometimes as early as 6 AM. Whenever Matt Holland answered the phone, the nameless individual on the other end would be pushy and disparaging, then would turn menacing. The nature of the call was always the same: You have to pay your debt; there is no way out.

Years earlier, Holland, who now lives in Spring Hill, Florida, had been arrested and spent some time in prison for breaking into cars with friends to steal stereos. Upon his release, Holland found himself facing $3,000 in debt from state court fees. It wasn’t long before that debt was passed from the government to a private debt collection firm, Linebarger Goggan Blair & Sampson, LLP.

Linebarger, Holland soon discovered, was unrelenting. The firm rang him constantly at inconvenient times, since state-owned debt isn’t restricted by federal debt collection rules that prohibit calls before 8 AM. The company flooded his mailbox with threatening letters, too.

The onslaught eventually got so bad Holland told the firm he’d moved just to get the barrage to stop.

“Nothing is more important than you paying them,” he told the Daily Poster.

Now the thirty-three-year-old father has finally escaped the worst, thanks to a state program that put him on a repayment plan. But he’s one of the lucky ones.

Across the United States, court debt has ballooned as states have turned to court costs, fines, and fees as revenue streams. A recent report by watchdog group Fines and Fees Justice Center found that court debt in the United States now totals at least a staggering $27.6 billion. That figure is a low estimate, the group noted in the report, because it relied on incomplete data collected from only twenty-five states.

To handle the collection of that debt, states, and municipalities — as well as the Internal Revenue Service — are increasingly turning to private firms, which in some states can add up to 40 percent surcharges onto the fees. In aggregate, that can translate into billions of dollars of payouts for the debt collectors.

“Linebarger is one of the biggest companies to . . . capitalize on this outsourcing of traditional government functions to for-profit companies,” explains Leslie Bailey, an attorney with the group Public Justice who is currently involved in a lawsuit against the company in Iowa for allegedly violating state and federal law.

A spokesperson for Linebarger, which is also hired by state and local governments to collect property taxes, water bills, and other debts, told the Daily Poster that it does business in twenty-two states, but would not go into further detail.

“As attorneys on behalf of these entities, we are not ethically permitted to disclose information that belongs to our client(s) without their express authority,” the spokesperson said.

Companies like Linebarger make money solely through fees they charge to debtors — and those charges can prove to be debilitating.

“The state doesn’t have to spend any money to collect its own debt,” explains Bailey. “They just outsource it to a company like Linebarger, and instead of getting paid by the state for the work that they’re doing to collect the debt, they just tack on these user fees so that the criminal defendants, who are already so poor that they can’t pay this debt, now have this additional fee on top of it.”

The fees charged by Linebarger and other private collection firms add up. A review of a hundred eleven contracts between private collection firms and sixty-five Florida counties by the Daily Poster and Fines and Fees found that the minimum fee tacked onto court debt was 25 percent. A vast majority of the contracts added a 40 percent fee, the maximum allowable under state law.

Linebarger had contracts with nearly half of the counties reviewed, and all of those contracts involved the firm charging at least a 25 percent fee to each debtor.