The move to go after the money ends a bureaucratic freeze that kept the issue in limbo for more than a year, despite reform pledges made after The Inquirer reported in February 2009 the $1 billion backlog.
The crackdown is to be officially announced Monday by court leaders and Mayor Nutter during a City Hall news conference.
Officials said Friday that the resignation in March of Vivian T. Miller as clerk of quarter sessions helped break the logjam. Miller's office had no computer record of bail debtors, but officials have figured out how to identify them from records of civil judgments for unpaid debts.
After Miller quit under pressure as the elected head of her agency - an obscure but important record-keeping arm of the courts - Prothonotary Joseph H. Evers took command of Miller's 100-member staff.
He worked with David D. Wasson 3d, the court system's chief deputy administrator, to design the campaign, extracting names of debtors and tweaking judicial computers to track balances and payments.
Wasson declined to comment Friday, but Evers said that in tight economic times for the city and the courts, even a modest return from the bail debt would be welcome. Court officials expect to find that many of the bail jumpers are indigent, and that some are in jail, and others dead.
The crackdown has also been developed with the help of Philadelphia lawyer Drew Salaman, an expert on debt collection. He could not be reached for comment Friday.
In the weeks ahead, the courts also plans to ask collection firms to bid for contracts to track down bail deadbeats.
Apart from the issue of bail from years past, the courts have begun, for the first time, to dun new bail jumpers.
The saga of the ever-growing mountain of bail debt is one of bureaucratic lassitude and unheeded warnings.
