He was hired as the deputy attorney general for Pennsylvania in charge of its Financial Enforcement Section. That unit collected debts and unpaid taxes owed to Pennsylvania. Some debts it collected on its own, and others were collected by private collection agencies working on commission. In Kimmett’s view, this was a problem: the private agencies sometimes held the money they collected and didn’t pay Pennsylvania any interest; other times, as he saw it, the collection agencies were being paid commissions for debts they hadn’t collected.