Welcome to the fourth quarter 2008 Portfolio Recovery Associates Incorporated earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) I would now like to turn the presentation over to Mr. Jim Fike, VP of Finance; please proceed sir.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining Portfolio Recovery Associates fourth quarter and full year 2008 earnings call. Speaking to you today will be Steve Fredrickson, our Chairman, President and CEO, Kevin Stevenson, our Chief Financial and Administrative Officer and Neal Stern, our Chief Operating Officer of Owned Portfolio. We will begin with prepared comments and then follow up with a question and answer period. Afterwards, Steve will wrap up the call with some final thoughts. Before we begin I’d like everyone to please take note of our Safe Harbor language. Statements on this call which are not historical including Portfolio Recovery Associates or management’s intentions, hopes, beliefs, expectations, representations, projections, plans or predictions of the future including with respect to the future portfolio’s performance, opportunities, future space and staffing requirements, future productivity of collectors, expansion of the RDS, IGS and MuniServices businesses and future contributions of the RDS, IGS and MuniServices businesses to earnings are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based upon management’s belief, assumptions and expectations of the company’s future operations and economic performance taking into account currently available information. These statements are not statements of historical facts. Forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, some of which are not currently known to us. Actual events or results may differ from those expressed or implied and any such forward-looking statements as a results of various factors including the risk factors and other risks that are described from time-to-time in the company’s filings with the Securities & Exchange Commission including but not limited to its Annual Reports on Form 10-K, its Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and its current reports on Form 8-K filed Securities & Exchange Commission and available through the company’s website which contain a more detailed discussion of the company’s business including risk and uncertainties that may affect future results. Due to such uncertainties and risks you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date hereof. The company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publically any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in the company’s expectations with regard thereto or to reflect any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such forward-looking statements are based in whole or in part. Now, here’s Steve Fredrickson, our Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks Jim and thank you all for attending Portfolio Recovery Associates fourth quarter 2008 earnings call. On today's call I will begin covering the company's results broadly. Neal Stern will then talk to you in more detail about our operational strategies and finally Kevin Stevenson will discuss our financial results in detail. After our prepared comments we will open up the call to Q&A. I would like to begin today by providing a little context as we examine our results. For PRA 2008 was the year of building, diversification, and continuous improvement in our collection operations. In a period of great turmoil concluding with the Wall Street meltdown and the economy slipping into a serious recession, Portfolio Recovery Associates held its ground and more. As you have no doubt seen in our press release EPS was pretty much flat for the fourth quarter and full-year. However revenue continue to grow nicely and cash collections were strong. While we are not pleased with our overall performance it was accomplished as we made many substantial investments in the future of PRA. Let me detail some of them. First we made to corporate acquisitions during the course of the year, MuniServices and the assets of Broussard Partners, both represent further by versification into the fee business. Importantly this diversification helped mitigate some of the economic softness that impacted collections towards the end of the year. We also shuttered our anchor receivables management operations in 2008 allowing PRA to focus resources on more profitable areas. PRA invested a record $280 million in portfolio acquisitions during the year positioning us for collections well into the next decade. We were also able to increase our bank credit line despite the credit crunch giving us the ability to keep building for the future. And lastly we strengthened…

Thanks Steven, operationally we continued to focus on efficiency and effectiveness in driving increased cash collections during the fourth quarter as we have all year. Efficiency in the quarter was positively impacted by the addition of even more automated dialer capacity, in that capacity was put to more effective use by leveraging our ability to dynamically re-score our entire portfolio on a daily basis. We believe our incrementing calling efforts and account segmentation helped mitigate some of the impact of the difficult economy. By way of example, the total number of agent phone calls made in the quarter exceeded the prior year by just over 64%. And because we were more heavily weighted toward the dialer we accomplished this with just an 18% larger staff. Some of that additional calling was targeted toward accounts that demonstrated an upward trend in our rescoring. These accounts otherwise might not have received much attention. In looking at the dollars collected from phone calls and accounts we've owned for more than five years we saw a year-over-year increase of 80% or $600,000 in December alone. We will continue to look for opportunities to refine our dynamic scoring process a regular basis and I believe this offers a way for us to respond very quickly to changing consumer payment behavior. As Steven mentioned the results from our legal portfolio in Q4 were again disappointing. While some portion of this certainly pertains to the difficult economy a fair amount of the performance slip continues to stem from the prior underinvestment in court costs that we’ve sought to correct over the last six months. While these investments have now been made in it appears that the lag between the expense and the return has increased and the short-term yield has deteriorated somewhat in the current environment. Legal…

Thank you Neal, like Q3 our fourth quarter 2008 financial performance shows both positive the benefits of our diversification into fee businesses as well as the negative, our allowance charges. Despite otherwise solid performance especially considering the current economic climate allowance charges moved our net income down substantially from where it would have been otherwise keeping our EPS and net income essentially flat to the comparable period in 2007. Specifically the net income in the quarter fell less than 1% to $10.6 million while EPS was $0.69 versus $0.70 in the year ago period. Total revenue for the quarter was $67 million which represents growth of 16.8% from the same period a year ago. Operating income was $20.3 million up about 4% from a year earlier period while net interest expense grew from $2.1 million 1 year ago to $2.9 million in Q4 which is down sequentially from $3 million in Q3 2008. Return on equity was 17.3% for 2008. While many might be pleased with a figure like this in the current environment we are not. We remain very focused on increasing that number back towards our historical 20%. Our weighted average interest costs for the acquisition line during the quarter was 4.18% down from 4.57% in Q3. At quarter end borrowing levels each 100 basis point [sling] in LIBOR either costs or saves us about $181,000 monthly. Breaking our fourth quarter revenue down into three components the majority of total revenue or $48.1 million came from income recognized on finance receivables. This is revenue generated by our owned debt portfolios. Income on finance receivables is derived from the $79.2 million in cash collections we recorded during the quarter reduced by an amortization rate including an $8.9 million allowance charge of 39.3%. This amortization rate compares with 36.5% in…

(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: It's very difficult to track the as you talk about the different pools, remind me how many different pools will you generally have in a quarter for accounting purposes?

Any given quarter you normally have, as I was saying kind of a normal core portfolio you would have a bankruptcy portfolio, medical we group separately and if you ever had a cost recovery pool that's a little more rare however. Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: So essentially we are talking about two main pools each quarter, our core pool and a bankruptcy pool.

That's right. Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: Now when you're taking an impairment in and say second quarter of 2008, that was in the core pool or was that in the bankruptcy pool.

That was the core. Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: Now when you go back to 2006 and these prior year's where you have been taking impairments what you're saying is that if you take the periods combined, if you take all the pools for those years versus your base business plan you are outperforming expectations but, and we are going to see the pluses come in over the long-term and the minuses are, that's essentially—

Now that's right that is exactly right and even the minuses may be, if our assumptions prove too conservative today you'll see releases of the deals are currently minuses so but that's right you have grasped the concept correctly. Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: When you're looking at a fourth quarter of 2008 in cash collections just generally the world really seem to change on September 15 and it was not easy before that but I have seen some things out of companies and consumers but I haven't seen in the past, what have you seen on your collection performance in the fourth quarter, obviously you took $9 million of impairments so it was softer than you expected although your cash collections came in slightly better than what we have modeled, have you seen and do you continue to see a change in behavior.

It's a subject we could talk about for a long time so let me just give you some highlights, October was actually I believe the third-best month that we had all year from a cash collections standpoint and then we dropped off in November although November was a short work month for us and them we dropped off further in December before rebounding in January. We definitely felt as though the consumer was if not as a result of being hit in the pocketbook was certainly hunkered down from all of the press that was out and really all of the negative gloom and doom stories together with what was going on in the stock market. We did see our average pure payment size come down a little bit in Q4 so throughout most of 2008 we've been running pretty steady in kind of $115 range plus or minus ensuring the fourth quarter we dropped to $111 and $109 and $106, again those are what we refer to as our average pure payment. The other thing that has continued to occur and we talked about it in the past is our customers are migrating from historically higher percentages of settlement in full and balance in full to more payers so the number of people that pay us every month has actually gone up dramatically. If we just look at December over the last three years, December 2006 we had 87,000 what we call pure paying accounts, we had 112,000 December of 2007 and we had 166,000 in December of 2008 so we feel as though we are making very good progress in getting our customers to liquidate accounts it's just that more of them have to be on payment plans as opposed to writing larger checks, tapping into home equity, things like that. Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: The first quarter is historically I think probably been the most important quarter it seems obviously collections have historically increased dramatically in the first quarter seasonally and it seems to set the base for the year, as you look through, we would expect that your first quarter, fourth quarter first quarter trend is going to reflect the economy but nevertheless we would still expect pretty significant ramp up maybe not to the same extent as the past and we're halfway through the first quarter and I know that March is a very important month but can you comment at all on the trends you are seeing, if you are seeing is seasonality or are you seeing much weaker trends from the fourth quarter to the first quarter this year than prior year's.

We are seeing an upward trend as would be expected with the normal seasonality. I think we also feel though and based on those statistics I gave you on payments in payment mix consumer is definitely being affected by what's going on in the economy so I suspect there will be some dampening but one message we really tried to send in the script and I'll just repeat it here is although we feel like we have been negatively impacted by the economy we have been pushing back very very hard. We have been making more phone calls, we feel like we have dramatically improved our ability to segment our portfolio and go after accounts that are more likely to pay. We have been pushing back to a huge degree and I would say in Q1 of 2009 we are in better shape to continue that pushing back and we ever have been. The question is where it all falls versus our increased efforts in productivity and obviously some negative impact from the economy. I can just tell you that thus far we’re seeing the normal or much of the normal quarterly impact that we would begin to see in Q1. Robert Napoli – Piper Jaffray: On the fee-based businesses I was wondering if you could give an organic growth rate for the business and where you see the most strength is it in a skip trace business or in a tax businesses.

Actually we had nice growth out of both, we are trying to combine the operations of the two government businesses as much as we can and so even in its last quarter we started to muddy the performance measurement capabilities between Muni and RDS to some degree but we saw growth across the fee businesses.

Your next question comes from the line of Mark Hughes – SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Mark Hughes – SunTrust Robinson Humphrey: You had alluded to I think seasonally stronger performance for the government services group in the fourth quarter, how meaningful is that seasonality, how should we think about Q1 in the commission business.

We tend to get some business license renewals business coming through in that fourth quarter and it is more weighted to the RDS business then they MuniServices business and the RDS is the smaller of those two government businesses so it's certainly material but it's not certainly the majority of what we saw. I would hope that although quarter-to-quarter we may have some challenges based on that strong growth that since both fee businesses are continuing their upward trajectory over time that we are getting as close to that number is possible in Q1. Mark Hughes – SunTrust Robinson Humphrey: The BK it seems like that was pretty good comment my right to assume that that is doing better relative to your expectations and the call center or the legal collections and if so why.

I don't know that we can give you an exact answer on that one and I don't want to pull something out of the air, I would say that obviously based on the allowance charges those accounts are doing better. You will remember though even though we have been doing it for a number of years now the bankruptcy business is a newer one for us and we have tended to underwrite and book those deals quite conservatively so I think that that has some of the impact on the observed performance versus expectations as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Hugh Miller – Sidoti & Company Hugh Miller – Sidoti & Company: I am assuming that in the fourth quarter you didn't have any compensation accrual reversal that kind of helped out with the comp line, is that correct.

No we did have one, $800,000 in total, so the two components of that we did reverse off a piece that the 2008 LT program and about $500,000 and it was about $300,000 of adjustment for FAS123R. Hugh Miller – Sidoti & Company: Can you talk about purchasing in the quarter obviously the fourth quarter the supply tends to increase that I would think that it was even more in this case given the economy but one might have anticipated it would have been maybe a little bit more aggressive in the fourth quarter with your purchasing activity, was it possibly just moderated by anticipation that pricing will continue to improve in the coming months and that you are just being a little bit more patient or what's the thought process there.

I would say that is exactly it, it was a very interesting quarter. From everything that we see in terms of delinquency and charge-off statistics it would certainly look as though 2009 continue to be a year of pretty decent supply and we were trying to be very careful in Q4 not to set the market and in doing so we probably lost more than our fair share although given pricing trends we are fine with that. Hugh Miller – Sidoti & Company: And the deals that you are seeing in the fourth quarter overall did they seem to be much better than what you were seeing in third quarter from a pricing standpoint and from the returns you would anticipate given the adjustments in your expectations for collections given the economy.

I would say that overall perceived value so that's price relative to perceived collections was improved in Q4 from Q3. Hugh Miller – Sidoti & Company: With regards to the FTE count number I was wondering if you had that for the fourth quarter, I think the third quarter number was 1041.

We don't have it with us sorry.

Your next question comes from the line of Sameer Gokhale – KBW Sameer Gokhale – KBW : Can you go over your comments on the $800,000 that you had in the quarter in OpEx I think as the benefit and then also can you just talk about the sequential trend in your comp and company expenses compared to last quarter because it looks like they were may be down slightly and then you saw the big revenue lift but if you can just talk about the two dynamics there, that would be helpful.

The first two things were the two components of the reversal, again these around numbers about $500,000 in the reversal of 2008 long-term incentive program, this would have been similar, $1.4 million in Q3 that was reversed. The other piece was our annual true up under FAS123R that kind of goes through every Q4 and that was $300,000. We were also down slightly as we mentioned on our collector headcount and the fourth quarter had a, less workdays than the third quarter and so all of that did impact the quarter-to-quarter comp trend. Sameer Gokhale – KBW : As far as your impairment charges I just want to make sure the impairment charges you took this quarter were those primarily related to the fact that you had accounts that may have historically paid you a lump sum up front and now are going on the payment plans is that what the impairment charges were related to this quarter or was it just kind of general weakness in the consumer.

I believe that is the case I believe that some of this impairment charge that we are incurring is result of that, I believe that some of the impairment charges we are booking today is resultant of the legal strategy that I described but the thing as we observe it though from a finance perspective if the cash wasn't there in November and December I don't assume is going to be here in June of next year. We take our lumps and move on and as I tried to go through these are reserves you can see that some of the cash shortfalls actually were doubled in terms of the allowance we took so we took twice as large allowance as our cash shortfall was. We are trying to be thoughtful as we go through these pools. Something else we are doing this quarter we are looking to give you a little bit more granularity in the 10-Qs and 10-Ks as well so we are looking to figure out a way to put some more yearly tranche allowance granularity out for you. Sameer Gokhale – KBW : This is something I have struggled with also and it is the magnitude of the impairment charges I know you talked about this in the past a lot but as you sit here today and you look at where we are at in the quarter and you look at the unemployment rate going up in some of these economic pressures, is it safe to say well okay you had a larger impairment charge than normal in Q4 but you got the bulk of them now behind you and that going forward you accounted for some of that economic weakness, can we get a sense of how we should think about that again given the state of the economy.

I will take you back to the whole, we were $800,000 short in cash yet we booked at one point $6 million allowance so we definitely are building buffer, we’re definitely building in some adjustment to cash collections certainly in the near-term and that’s driving some of these allowances you are seeing. Q1 is going to be obviously a key quarter for us as well all of 2009 so from our perspective again, I can can’t say it enough, we really look at this what’s the cash shortfall, what’s our trend, what’s the observed trends look like, we come up with a cash projection and book the allowance so its been a pretty consistent process.

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Shane – Jefferies & Co. Richard Shane – Jefferies & Co.: last quarter you made the comment about on the 400 basis point decline in legal collections attribute to that basically you define that as $3 million of missed legal cash, you thought that you would potentially recover that over time, what’s the view now, has that gone or is the expectation that you may in fact get that down the road still.

Not to break it down too far, some of it we did get back and that was masked a bit by a further deterioration on accounts that we didn’t invest in or have not yet invested in. Part of it as I said is that I think its going to take longer because we’ve seen some weakness in the legal collection channel and then there’s just some general deterioration given the economy. So its impossible for me to break out how much to attribute to each of those pieces. I guess the answer would be yes we still expect to have a good ROI on the investment that we’ve made in our legal process. Richard Shane – Jefferies & Co.: In going through the cash shortfalls for 2007 and then one shortfall in the 2008 pool Q1 2007 $800,000 cash shortfall, $1.2 million allowance, Q2 $1 million cash shortfall, $2.1 million allowance, Q3 $700,000 $1 million allowance and then Q2 2008 it sounds like it was a $600,000 cash shortfall and a $600,000 allowance is the difference there that on the 2007 vintages you were effectively lowering the future expected cash collections and on the 2008 its more of a one time issue.

Remember we’re looking at three months of cash flows and so if we see a month to month trend we’ll take that into consideration whether its deteriorating or improving. And so that piece of the pie together with the specific shape of the curve that we’re looking at and how severely it may be falling off as time goes on, will definitely impact that multiple that we talked about of allowance relative to observed cash shortfall.

You talk about the 2007 Q1 that pool had already booked a $1.6 million allowance in the prior quarter so I think part of the older deals you can see certainly, you have more data points to observe in older deals. Richard Shane – Jefferies & Co.: Are there any covenants that we need to be aware of related to your debt facilities related to collections, one of your competitors recently disclosed that they were having a covenant issue based on collection multiples, is that anything we need to be thinking about here.

No. I will mention we do have an EBITDA coverage ratio but the, adds back portfolio amortization and so that’s something that people, they don’t read the fine print. Richard Shane – Jefferies & Co.: When you are actually setting the collection multiples or reviewing the collection multiples at the end of the quarter how much incremental data do you take in, for example do you cut off the data based on what’s available 12/31 do you actually look at what’s happening, its now February 12th, you have a lot more insight, you’ve seen your cash collections, we’ve also seen another 600,000 jobs lost. How much does that factor into post 12/31 information.

Typically when the quarter is over, the quarter is over. Again as any good accountant would tell you unless something dramatic and material occurred, some subsequent event, but no generally for us when the quarter is over its over.

Your next question comes from the line of John Neff – William, Blair & Company John Neff – William, Blair & Company: Could you give us the total gross allowance charge and the total reversal for the quarter.

We’ll add it up for you. John Neff – William, Blair & Company: Were there any more additional advances to the external legal channel during the quarter and what can we infer from some of the difficulties in that channel about the overall collections environment if anything, in other words you mentioned some sub par vendor performance is that symptomatic of broader problems or is that vendor specific.

The investment piece in Q4 was relatively similar to Q3m, slightly smaller. We clearly have some vendor performance issues, some did just fine. And some did not. Those did not we are moving swiftly to bring that in house where possible and make other vendor arrangements where necessary. There are certain regions or parts of the country where some vendors seem to be experiencing more difficulty and we’re paying closer attention there. I think there’s a good amount to attribute to simple vendor underperformance. Also if you’re looking at it relative to the call center again our calling went up very dramatically so as we said we’re peddling quite a bit faster. I’m not sure that that same incremental amount of effort took place at all of these law firms and so that’s borne out in their numbers to some degree. John Neff – William, Blair & Company: Do you have a vision for how much, what the ultimate external internal legal collection split might look like a year from now.

No, we do it when we can and where its smart so there’s other markets we’re investigating that’s for sure. I don’t have any desire to move so rapidly that we take on more then we can handle, that would be a real disaster. And we have a number of vendors who performed really well and I’m not looking to disrupt that. We’ll see. John Neff – William, Blair & Company: Do you have any sense of what percentage of your bankruptcy accounts, what percentage actually own a home.

We’ve done some testing along those line, again its not an easy data point to get at and we have done some in depth testing on that and it would appear as though our home ownership rates would be similar to what you would observe in the national population. John Neff – William, Blair & Company: So roughly two thirds.

That’s right. John Neff – William, Blair & Company: Total collectors and collector supervisors at the end of the quarter, the number in the third quarter was 1482 and I think there was some decline.

Your gross allowance charge number was $9.5 million and then reversal was $650,000, the 1482 number was 1477. John Neff – William, Blair & Company: I thought you had said that cash collections for every single year of portfolio purchasing had exceeded original expectations, is that—

If you look all buying in a total aggregated year, yes all those aggregated yearly deals exceeded our original booked expectations.

Your next question comes from the line of Bill Carcache – Fox-Pitt Kelton Bill Carcache – Fox-Pitt Kelton: On leverage it seems like you’re keeping powder dry as you expect pricing to improve, but let’s say in theory that we’ll hit peak unemployment in the fourth quarter would that lead you to raise leverage, I’m just trying to get a sense for the point where you’d step on the gas in terms of ramping up purchases and I guess the broader question is whether the most attractive pricing is coincident with peak unemployment or if there’s lag.

I think that its all going to be dependent upon seller strategy, sellers can hold back or let go inventory based on a lot of different factors and so we just have to take the inventory as its offered and evaluate its relative value at the time that’s its offered. As to increased leverage between internal cash flow and the dry powder that we have we feel as though we’ve got a lot of buying potential for 2009. if we are acquiring portfolios that are behaving in such a manner that’s leading us to believe that the profitability of the pools that are available is just so compelling I think we would be foolish not to consider looking at different levels of leverage but that would be evaluated very carefully because we are concerned about going too far on the leverage side. It would be reviewed very carefully at the time we got close to that threshold. Bill Carcache – Fox-Pitt Kelton: Is there a role for the collection industry to play in some government programs designed to get bad loans off of the books of so many banks, someone from ACA was recently quoted as saying that probably for the first time in the history of the industry that the needs of the federal government are actually aligned with the collection industry. What are your thoughts on that idea and the potential implications if any for you.

I think that the easier to see potential opportunity would probably be for the contingent fee side of the world then necessarily for somebody like us. These programs are changing at such a great rate and no one really seems even after they’re announced to understand exactly what is going to go on so at this point I’d say its something interesting to think about but who knows where reality is actually going to shake out.

Your next question comes from the line of Edward Hemmelgarn – Shaker Investments Edward Hemmelgarn – Shaker Investments: On interest expense that will be dropping significantly won’t it in the first quarter, given the fact that if I’m right you’re at one month LIBOR plus 140 so your rate drops off by more then half doesn’t it.

If that LIBOR rates goes down, absolutely. Edward Hemmelgarn – Shaker Investments: Would you expect to ever get to a point that if the amount of non bankruptcy paper that was being offered would increase in attractiveness given the fact that the longer term yields from that should be much better then bankruptcy that you might really change your mix dramatically to be buying much more non bankruptcy versus bankruptcy or—

We in any given year will jump around quite a bit from a product type standpoint based on where we see the most attractive buying potential and that is an ongoing discussion that we have here and as we see the relative observed profitability of any particular deal change we’ll hopefully be smart enough to chase the more profitable paper. Edward Hemmelgarn – Shaker Investments: In the last recession the profitability of those portfolios, your purchases during the recessionary and thereafter time period improved rather dramatically, how would you compare your at least initial looks at what’s being offered right now versus and the pricing relative to what it was back then or at least your initial thoughts on what you were buying back then.

On an absolute basis there are certainly areas where the pricing is quite similar that missing ingredient is perfect clarity as to what the next three or four years are going to hold for us and for the charge-off consumer. If we knew that we’d be [private]. Edward Hemmelgarn – Shaker Investments: If you think of a deleveraging process here that as consumers start to pick up, increase their savings [inaudible] and the availability new borrowing seems to be getting worse obviously does that help or hurt you.

Our view is that for the first time in a long time its actually a socially fashionable thing to pay down your debt and that is certainly a new phenomenon in the US at least in recent memory. So we think that part of that is behind the build in the number of paying accounts that we’ve been getting. Again the payments may not be of a similar size that we had but we’re getting a lot of them and to the extent we can keep these people on payment plans I think that that speaks well of our ability to do just fine liquidating these pools over time. Edward Hemmelgarn – Shaker Investments: You’ve talked in the past of how its difficult keeping people on payment plans obviously, how much is that a big part of everybody’s efforts just trying to keep people on payment plans that are on payment plans.

I can tell you for a collector making sure that their payment plans don’t break and that customer X that paid last month pays again this month, that’s a big deal and we are all over it.

Your next question comes from the line of David Scharf – JMP Securities David Scharf – JMP Securities: When you went through all the detail of the allowances by year, it looks like half of the quarterly charge was derived from 2007 pools, were any of those pools written up in the intervening months before these charges were taken. Obviously 2007 and 2008 was a dramatic increase in the volume of purchases and just trying to get a sense looking back the last 24 months if you’ve actually been writing up any of those.

The concept is that the quarter is did the deal multiple go up, I would say probably not. I don’t have that readily available right now but the yield to the extent the cash collections came in early and it was strong that would have let the yield float up because again the goal being that you set the cash collections and then the yield is computational so it is quite likely I guess that at least there’s a couple of percentage points in there of those deal going up. David Scharf – JMP Securities: The pull back in productivity at Jackson what was the commentary given surrounding that.

We increased hours worked there substantially and we’ve got a strong inverse correlation between hours worked and productivity so as you get a lot of new people working a lot of additional hours you get that fall off and we believe that that was really the explanation for a vast majority of what was observed. They had a 22% increase in hours paid during the quarter and our experience is is that is enough to cause a productivity decline of almost a like amount. David Scharf – JMP Securities: So since the net total collector amount isn’t moving around much it sounds like the mix of your collector base is increasing towards this lower wage region probably.

Remember that’s where we have empty seats. So as we add people we tend to locate in the centers that we have some space and we’ll bounce around between attrition and staffing in the various centers on a quarter by quarter basis and it just happened that although our net attrits caused our collector workforce to come down we were doing a lot of hiring in Tennessee. David Scharf – JMP Securities: On the fee for service businesses in aggregate is there much customer concentration among these, in the contingency world which you are out of now, a number of third party collectors are reliant very often on a couple of large card issuers but when you look at your fee for service businesses in aggregate is there any client concentration issues.

On the government services side we are extremely diverse. On the skip trace, asset location business we do have a few larger clients there. David Scharf – JMP Securities: Has there been any consolidation in recent quarters that has impacted those businesses.

No. In fact to the contrary I’d say we have more prospective business in both currently then we’ve had in some time. David Scharf – JMP Securities: With the relative lack of funding in your business you tend to be the exception and given how much pricing has come in, is there any push back now from sellers to the point where even though charge-offs and delinquencies on a upper trajectory, are we getting to a level of pricing just based on the lack of bidders and lack of financing where they’re just throwing up their hands and saying you know what, we’ve taken so many lumps might as well just give this to a contingency shop. Is there the possibility of supply actually drying up for the purchase industry this year.

I don’t think that supply would dry up, I think that it would be one of those issues where pricing would have to come up to what the sellers view is more realistic levels. And the sellers especially over the longer term or even the medium term tend to be very realistic sellers because they know what they’re getting from their collection agency channels and if prices are coming down but their liquidity in those collection agency channels is dropping as well, for the most part, they’re going to take their lumps and sell. We have been running into situations here and there where people have come back to us and said well, good news is you’re high bidder, the bad news is we just can’t swallow this purchase price. And we’ve seen a few of those. :

Looking at the core deals for 2007 generally it looks like its very consistently the rates moved up about 2% on each deal from where they were booked, two percentage point yield. So if you look at really each quarterly deal, each one of them moved up about 2% from where they were originally booked.

There are no additional questions at this time; I would like to turn it back over to management for any additional or closing comments.

I do want to note we cleared the queue. First I’d like to thank all of you for participating in our conference call. Before we go I’d like to reiterate some key points about our fourth quarter and full year, as I mentioned at the outset of the call for PRA 2008 was a year of building diversification and continuous improvement in our collections operations. Q4 was a period of strong cash collections, advantageous portfolio buying and strong performance by our fee businesses. During a period of great turmoil concluding with the Wall Street meltdown and the economy slipping into a serious recession Portfolio Recovery Associates held its ground and more. We made a number of important investments in our future growth investing in people and entities such as MuniServices, and the assets of Broussard Partners and of course in portfolios with a record $280 million in acquisitions in 2008. These investments have impacted our short-term results but they certainly created substantial long-term opportunity for PRA. Its with this outlook that we move into 2009 and beyond. Thanks for your time and attention, we look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.