Are we getting our stuff back?

Alright, as most of you know I handle our communications with the debt collection agency. That means I send them lists of people to add to debt collection and updates for people already in collections. I also receive reports from them detailing their progress. I can't be sure of exact percentages, but every week I get a report of all the leftover processing fees that come from people returning items that have been lost without the fees being waived. This list has about 30 to 50 accounts on it, although it's always hard to tell because of how it's formatted. Then on Wednesday I get the lists of accounts to submit and update. Now normally there's about 55 accounts to submit; that is, accounts with lost items on them valuing over $50 (including proc. fees) that have been lost for 75 days. So on a week-by-week basis, there's about 50 accounts that have gone to lost who's items are returned, and 50 accounts that have gone to lost who's items are not returned.

Ok, that's the basics. I'm also the only person besides Sara herself who can access the collection agency's database. That means that we're the only two people who see the reports of what the collection agency is doing. While I wasn't thinking about the implications of this for the past few months (since I've just been too darn busy), in the past couple of weeks I've used some spare time to look at the reports and see just what's happening. Now of course the agency wants to phrase things as favorably to themselves as possible, so I started adding up numbers for myself. They have language like "Dollars in Process" and "% of Dollars Activated" which is 90%. However, I used my own method to determine a percentage of how much money we're getting back from the amount we send to collections. For you non-mathematically inclined persons, it's very, very simple. If you divide the smaller part by the whole (say 2/5), you get the percentage of the whole. 5/5 is 100% and 2/5 is 40%. Well, taking the numbers for the money the agency actually recovered for us in the entire period they've been collecting for us up to January 31, it's $895,065.05 in materials recovered, fees paid and dollars waived. That's out of a total of $1,702,186.13. If you divide the first by the second, you get 52.58% (approximately). That means that up until now, the collection agency has only gotten back a little under 53% of the stuff that gets lost.

What do you guys think, is this agency worthless, or is that about as good a return as we could expect?